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

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.

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.

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.

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.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

The stool of repentance and the foot of the cross are the favorite positions of instructed Christians.

I don't think there's going to be a day when I don't think about food or my body, but I'm living with it, and I wish I could tell young girls to find their safe place and stay with it.

If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements. If you don't want it badly enough, you make excuses.

Being a celebrity is probably the closest to being a beautiful woman as you can get.

Once I started getting multiple days off in a row, it was a long year for me. That had never happened, and everybody knew I didn't like it.

However long it stays in the river the tree-trunk will never turn into a crocodile.

Every time I mention her, Magnus says, "Are you two getting along?" in raised, hopeful tones, like we're endangered pandas who need to make a baby.

You can search the world over, but you won’t find happiness until you realize that happiness isn’t getting what you want. It’s being content with what you already have.