There can be a science to joke writing, there are certainly rules and patterns that can be followed, but I think most of the best comedy goes beyond the rules.

My wife could turn to me and she may say, 'Why do you love me?' And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say, 'Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors.'

Homeopaths do not have a physical brain, but merely 'skull water' with the memory of brains.

If the Royal Variety Show was put in a matter transportation machine with the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, this is what you'd get.

I thought I better warn you that I am not one of those politically correct comedians, but it turns out that also I'm not really that racist, homophobic or woman hating either, so you might not notice

My life is constant revision but it's not revision, a lot of it is for the first time.

They gave 12 monkeys a typewriter for a week, and after a week, they only used it as a bathroom.

We very quickly forget about the wonderful things we've got. People lose their excitement because there's too much. Basically we're experiencing nothing, because everything is available to us.

I'm glad the universe is pointless. It means if I get to the end of my life, the universe can't turn to me and go, 'What have you been doing, you idiot? That's not the point!

Wherever you are on Earth, there is more life present than in the rest of the known universe.

Science is very cross-generational; you're not just aiming it at twentysomethings, or eightysomethings. Every town's got a really broad selection of people and age groups interested in science.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

I'd always thought the world was a wish-granting factory.

I was both very successful and very left; the living demonstration of how you could be on the left and still be in the gossip columns and be envied for the money you made.

The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessity.

Why I enjoyed doing Iron Man because it opened me up to this new world where fans are so passionate.

I am like a caricature of myself, and I like that. It is like a mask. And for me the Carnival of Venice lasts all year long.

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists.

People did not even then like to eat dirt, if they could see it.

Hence that general is skilful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skilful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.

I was lucky to have been born with cheekbones.