1.
If I won the lottery I'd start a charity that helped little family hardware stores, cobblers and fruit shops open in city centres.
Alexei Sayle
2.
My name is Alexei Yuri Gagarin Siege of Stalingrad Glorious Five Year Plan Sputnik Tractor Moscow Dynamo Back Four Balowski. Me Dad was a bit of a Communist, know what I mean?
Alexei Sayle
3.
If you travel to the States... they have a lot of different words than like what we use. For instance: they say 'elevator', we say 'lift'; they say 'drapes', we say 'curtains'; they say 'president', we say 'seriously deranged git.'
Alexei Sayle
4.
Honestly, sometimes I get really fed up of my subconscious - it's like it's got a mind of its own.
Alexei Sayle
5.
People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.
Alexei Sayle
6.
Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git.
Alexei Sayle
7.
Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, may have had his charms, but he really couldn't be considered hip.
Alexei Sayle
8.
There's a part of me that still hates everything, and my natural view default setting is still very cynical and dark
Alexei Sayle
9.
I've been going to Granada for many years and 12 years ago bought a house a few miles outside the city.
Alexei Sayle
10.
I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor, so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn't work in the summer though. I don't have the right clothes.
Alexei Sayle
11.
If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't.
Alexei Sayle
12.
Dire Straits is a great band. Someone tells you they like ""Brothers in Arms"" and immediately you know they're a stupid annoying git.
Alexei Sayle
13.
Israel is the Jimmy Saville of nation states.
Alexei Sayle
14.
A lot of those comics can't hold down relationships and they've got no other life apart from performing. They sleep in their Jags and a lot of them can't even talk. All they can do is tell gags.
Alexei Sayle
15.
Even a blind dog can find a bone every so often.
Alexei Sayle
16.
I feel sorry for many politicians we expect them to be completely consistent and moralised when we're not.
Alexei Sayle
17.
I liked 35 and in both my novels that is the age of the lead characters. I tried making them my age but they just seemed to keep moaning about stuff.
Alexei Sayle
18.
The optimum frequency with which comedians should do a series is every year. I do one every three years. My audience is literally dying off.
Alexei Sayle
19.
I think that my ideas of the world are that it's random and cruel but kind of quite comical really, and therefore the humour, in a sense, springs from that.
Alexei Sayle
20.
But as in all cults, what's central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you're very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.
Alexei Sayle
21.
Most of the Communists I knew were nice people.
Alexei Sayle
22.
However, my problems with my memory are further complicated by the fact that while I don't have any recollection of things I have actually done, I have very vivid recollections of loads of things that I haven't done.
Alexei Sayle
23.
Now, as a comic, if you're vaguely amusing you can go straight into TV, then you play the O2 and then everyone's sick of you.
Alexei Sayle
24.
People aren't universally heroic.
Alexei Sayle
25.
I wanted to write about how people's beliefs shift.
Alexei Sayle
26.
First off, I have to mention what is undoubtedly the greatest phenomenon of the modern era: All You Can Eat Buffets.
Alexei Sayle
27.
Everyone I used to work with is still alive and can afford expensive lawyers.
Alexei Sayle
28.
I'm sure a psychologist would see something highly significant in how absent-minded I am. I mean I'd forget my head if it wasn't attached to my neck by muscles, ligaments and my esophagus.
Alexei Sayle
29.
People used to think I was just a shouty comic but I was doing stuff about Sartre.
Alexei Sayle
30.
I always thought communism was crap, really.
Alexei Sayle
31.
You can't do comedy with a beard.
Alexei Sayle
32.
I like the south of Spain, notably for the Moorish influence and the weather.
Alexei Sayle
33.
I did six series for the BBC and that was enough. I've been writing for ten years, which is more challenging artistically.
Alexei Sayle
34.
I exist as an annexe of the BBC. I'm down the road a bit from the main building, in a little hut.
Alexei Sayle
35.
I suppose the common idea of me is that I'm going to be someone who's hyper and cracking jokes all the time, but people who meet me are soon disabused of that notion.
Alexei Sayle
36.
Most of my friends are women - I quite fancied being a woman in a way.
Alexei Sayle
37.
For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.
Alexei Sayle
38.
As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.
Alexei Sayle
39.
It seems easier to make a career out of comedy now than it was in the 1980s.
Alexei Sayle
40.
If someone starts agreeing with me, I don't like it. Out of pique, I become something else.
Alexei Sayle
41.
I don't think people were that interested in what I was doing for the most of the 1990s.
Alexei Sayle
42.
I don't think I'd ever get thin, but I don't see why I should necessarily think that I couldn't You can't live your life for your routines.
Alexei Sayle
43.
It always seemed to be a constant that my parents were political.
Alexei Sayle
