Arthur Smith Quotes
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I abhor nothing more than bumping into someone I know on the Tube.
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It's worth turning up to an awards gig if you know you've won one but, since you never do know, it's not worth it.
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The history of the relationship between comedy and swimming is short indeed. Of course it is always funny when someone falls into water, but that's about it.
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Give me the new thing and give it to me now. I don't want that old thing - I've seen it, heard it, bought it, slept with it, loved it, but now I'm bored with the old thing and I'm gagging for the new stuff.
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When a writer dies you get a higher standard of obituary.
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My eyebrows could do with a trim.
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The outfits come and go but there is a constant that I like about the catwalk model: the snotty expression.
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My sister-in-law believes that few narratives are so tightly constructed that you can't skip boring bits and still keep abreast of what's going on.
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The Romantic poets were the prototype ramblers, and I've often found myself following in their footsteps - although perhaps not all of their footsteps since a typical walk for Samuel T. Coleridge might last two days and cover 145km.
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Acting is the most demanding, painful job in the world.
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Don Quixote's 'Delusions' is an excellent read - far better than my own forthcoming travel book, 'Walking Backwards Across Tuscany.'
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After you've read a novel, you only retain a vague memory of its contents. You remember the atmosphere, the odd image or phrase or vivid cameo.
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Because comedy is cheap to put on: if you've got a play or an opera, there's a whole load of people and a set, but comedy is just one man or woman. And because TV has learned to love comics - there's so many more around now than when I started out.
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If you want to write something of length, however modern and radical, you must live the life of an elderly gentleman of the 1950s.
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A savage review is much more entertaining for the reader than an admiring one; the little misanthrope in each of us relishes the rubbishing of someone else.
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It was Julie Burchill who decreed that, beyond a certain age, a man should not be seen in a leather jacket.
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Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.
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Every generation of children has its private hero.
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When they meet a stand-up comic, people sometimes remark: 'That must be the hardest job in the world.' Among comedians, only Freddie Starr is not embarrassed and slightly appalled by this remark.
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Global warming, the ongoing destruction of the planet, Third World debt, the uselessness of the railways, the takeover by the corporations, the scary George Bush person: all these things are important and should be animating me into outrage. Yet somehow they do not.
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The book may be garbage, but if it weighs in at a kilo or more, I stand before its author in awe.
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Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.
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Reading the play at home, however fulfilling, can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended.
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I've been trekking the hills and lanes of the British countryside for nearly four decades now and I've come to associate my passion with overexcited poets rather than pampered painters.