I think some people ramp a side of themselves up for performance purposes.
Everything becomes magnified at night. Sounds travel in a different way, it's dark, and everything seems far more spooky.
I went on the pill when I was 16, put on four stone... so that proved to be a very effective contraceptive.
Most of us manage the fateful things that happen in our lives the best we can, certainly not to a Stalin-like 20-year plan.
A good culture in a hospital can absorb and manage a few bad nurses, but once the culture becomes bad in itself, bad nursing practice is much harder to hide.
The problem with comedy audiences - it's like the Coliseum - when they see someone struggling, they don't feel altruistic towards them. They feel slightly repulsed by it.
My father was an engineer and my mother was a social worker, and they met as young socialists. That probably tells you everything you need to know about my attitude to money - I've never really been bothered about it.
I remember when Victoria Wood started to come through, and I thought she was great, though she and I are very different in our approach.
The comedian sticks as religiously to her theme as a dancer sticks to a diet.
There are so many cliches associated with mental health - such as the 'fine line between lunacy and genius' - which are, on the whole, a load of rubbish.
I think there's a far more general audience now because I've done more populist stuff on telly.
I wasn't one of those hideous children who make their parents sit through hour-long performances when you're seven. I didn't do anything like that thankfully.
I have such admiration for single mothers. I simply don't comprehend how you'd cope with that intensity, the lack of breaks, ever, on your own.
I cannot abide anyone treating another human being like a piece of dirt, whatever the context.
Whatever situation you are in, that is what is normal for you.
What they did was to make a pilot and it may well go to series at the next festival but I don't have any news on that. It's already been on Paramount actually, but as it's on Paramount it'll probably be on several more times... hopefully.
I made a supreme effort not to do that thing that parents do, which is to bore people without children to death by going on and on about how funny their children are, so there's none of that hopefully.
Privatisation splits hospital services into increasingly small packages.
We women continue to swallow this line that it's unladylike or even proof of being a lesbian if you wear flat shoes like Doc Martens. I'm prepared to put up with that accusation, because at least my feet aren't killing me and I don't look like a bandy ostrich.
So, I kind of rather was hoping that people thought it would have a nice mixture of different topics and it also takes in the fact that I've had two children recently.
I was always being called upon to be an honorary boy alongside my brothers. I don't think I'd be a comic now if it hadn't been for that.
I'm not a flag waver for obesity. It's not healthy, and you have a crap life because there is such a downer on it.
People are so different in reality from the picture created of them on TV. So it's all a creation; everything is made up.
Does anyone really go into nursing intending to be apathetic, cold and removed from suffering? I find that very difficult to believe.
I tend to think the world is a bit of a miserable place, so anyone who can add to people's optimistic, cheerful side is doing a good job, which is what I hope I'm doing.
It is unrealistic to expect an entire profession to be completely good. There are bound to be some individuals who are stressed, who are unkind, who are a bit rubbish at their job, who are in the wrong career.
I have big friends who won't go swimming because they're too embarrassed about it. I feel that's such a shame, because actually people should be encouraging fat people who are exercising to do it, not pointing and laughing.
Managers of hospitals over the years have been increasingly recruited from outside the health service, and although their experience of running a supermarket chain might allow them to balance the books, it does not mean they have any insight into how a ward should be managed and patients best served.
Wild men are so enormously attractive.
I do say no to lots of things, actually! I know it doesn't look like it. But I have a tendency to a) be rubbish at saying no, and b) be pushed by some kind of Protestant work ethic.
The way to a man's heart is through his hanky pocket with a breadknife.
People can forgive each other.
Punk allowed women to stop looking feminine. Oh, the relief.
I read that book 'Fat is a Feminist Issue', got a bit desperate halfway through and ate it.
I buy smoked mackerel in a vain attempt at being healthy. I do actually really like it, and you don't have to cook it, which is handy.
I'm too nervous to eat before I go onstage, and I'll usually eat out after the performance or when I get home at midnight.
I swam at school a lot. Long-distance swimming in pools, and diving, then when we moved to Hastings when I was 13 I used to swim in the sea all the time; I loved it out of season and when it was rough.
You look across the board at comedy quiz shows, and they are mainly hosted by men.
I often tell audiences at the start of my shows that I'm not gay because I've got petitions from lesbian groups saying 'Can you tell people you're heterosexual because you're giving us a bad name.'
I must be an anorexic because an anorexic looks in the mirror and sees a fat person.
If you're a fat person - and especially if you're a woman - at all stages of your life you'll get abuse for it, so you have to work out a way of dealing with it. The best way is to be humorous about it - that defuses any tension.
I have friends who vote Tory, and I'm appalled, but that's not to say they're not great people in so many other ways.
Over the years I attempted to make my style a bit more relaxed 'cause the initial style you couldn't watch for more than ten minutes without wanting to kill me.
I don't hold any candle for drama versus comedy.
There are problems with nursing - such as the issue of nurses all having to do degrees these days. But that doesn't mean to say the entire infrastructure of nursing is falling about and that it is populated by unfeeling psychopaths, which is, frankly, the implication sometimes.
Jeremy Clarkson is rather charming, but I can't stomach his public persona. I don't like his casual racism and casual misogyny.
My mum is bright, ambitious, well read, political and very bolshie: when my dad was conscripted into the Army and posted to Libya, she convinced some general to let her go with him. I don't know how she managed it.
I think there's a danger that we're moving towards a state where the people we are expected to admire are almost not human anymore, and I don't like that. I prefer it when someone looks like a nice person, and you think, 'I could have a laugh with them in the pub.'
I love doing stand-up. It's so self-contained - you go there, you do it, you go home - but with telly, there are too many people involved with it with opinions. You have a product, and everyone wants to change it.
