I used to do my Nelson Mandela voice to blag restaurant tables in Cape Town. It rarely worked. Now what a great city that is.

Multimedia? As far as I'm concerned, it's reading with the radio on!

Politics now is rather like going into Starbucks for a coffee.

In a more intellectually rigorous age, I wouldn't be talked about as a satirist at all. I would just be a topical comedian.

It is almost impossible to say the name of Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawat without adding 'give a dog a bone'

When you consider what Tony Blair was saying about liberty, human rights and that sort of thing, it would be terribly revolutionary to sell the speeches he and Jack Straw made in 1994.

I had an Edinburgh, middle-class childhood and a public school education.

Now I'm instantly nervous about the demands of doing a weekly column.

I am just fascinated by this reassurance from a menacing figure. It is rather frightening.

Tony Blair has always said he will be judged by history. Now Alastair Campbell is history we await his judgment.

When George Bush finally leaves the White House, the satire industry will briefly join the rest of the economy in recession. It will certainly be the end of an era.

Live life to the fullest or foolest.

I've never been so sure about the rest of my life than I am in this moment. This girl is the rest of my life.

Men seldom take the opinion of their equal, or of a man like themselves, upon trust.

I devoted my career to building an affinity with my fans who have supported me unflinchingly and no barbed wire fence or prison wall will stop that.

With no object no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking.

We're fighting three wars now. Imagine how many we'd be fighting if President Obama hadn't won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I used to think we were going to win in the '60s. Nixon went out and I thought we won.

Drug use makes you snappy, and you get very bad-tempered and have terrible hangovers.

Drugs are nihilistic: they undermine all values and radically overturn all our ideas about good and evil, what is just and what is unjust, what is permitted and what is forbidden.

I can't say it strongly enough; to integrate meditation in action is the whole ground and point and purpose of meditation