I have a stepladder. It's a very nice stepladder but it's sad that I never knew my real ladder.

I'm busy and that's the way I like it - when I have too much downtime I get into trouble.

We were the only black family in an estate with 1,000 white families. Liverpool being quite racist in the Sixties, it was a bit grim growing up.

Critics called me 'egregious' - I had to look that one up - and 'creepy', but now I don't read them, I weigh them.

My life has been, I suppose, the most incredible series of highs and lows.

Once journalists have been rifling through your dustbins, you do try and keep them at arms' length.

It's evolve or die, really, you have to evolve, you have to move on otherwise it just becomes stagnant.

The inventory process and stepping back in your life can sometimes be a very dark process. But it also can be extremely funny and surprising.

I was thinking - if we get a cell with a trouser press, we can make cheese toasties.

Who needs drugs when you have Takeshi's Castle?

It's not supposed to be easy, if it's easy, it's no good, that's the way I look at it.

Not only believe in yourself but trust in yourself. Confidence will bloom.

In space you don't stop.

Honestly, I think I've stretched a talent which is so thin it's almost transparent over a quite unbelievable term of years.

With black people, there are 50 Hitlers over the course of history.

You said a curse is only a curse if I allowed myself to me cursed by it. You said... I had it in my power to free myself of any curse - that curses were preludes to blessings.

I'm nicer on tax day than I am when I'm on deadline.

I take care of everybody. I'm either hugging you or making sure that you're not sick, because my backpack has every kind of medicine in it.

When you sing the same song over and over and over again, it stops meaning what it originally meant to you. It starts sounding like white noise, or my washing machine.

Filming is a funny combination of having a good time and not being able to wait until its over.

My old school in Liverpool is now a performing-arts school, and I kind of teach there - I use the word lightly - but I go there and talk to students.