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" I have occasionally - if ever I do interviews that are difficult or nerve-wracking - I take my wife's dog tags and have them in my pocket because it's a very quick way to realize that what I'm doing is not that important. It's not really worth getting stressed about because it's not, you know, war. "

John Oliver

Know

You

Wife

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" I feel more at home knowing I'm not really at home. It takes all the pressure off you trying to fit in! "

John Oliver

Pressure

Trying

" You can write jokes at any point of the day. Jokes are not that hard to write, or they shouldn't be when it is literally your job. "

" There is no greater anesthetic than sport. "

" When you're dealing with serious subjects, there is a pressure to be absolutely sure that you know what you're doing. "

" I would hate to meet myself at 15. "

" It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them. "

" If you work on a comedy show, your basic form of communication is teasing. That's generally how we speak to each other: you communicate the information between the lines of insulting sentences. "

" You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well. It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them. "

" Australia turns out to be a sensational place, albeit one of the most comfortably racist places I've ever been in. They've really settled into their intolerance like an old resentful slipper. "

" The disconnect between America and its military is shocking. "

" People really have come for a dialogue when they go to a stand-up show in the U.K. They say, 'I understand that you have now finished your little comedy monologue; now I have something to say regarding what I've just heard. "

" You just try to be true to your idea of what is funny and what is also interesting. "

" Politics has become infused with narcissism in America. "

" I know I'd be an absolutely horrendous politician. "

" It really helps a comedian to be an outsider. "

" Stand-up comedy seems like a terrifying thing. Objectively. Before anyone has done it, it seems like one of the most frightening things you could conceive, and there's just no shortcut - you just have to do it. "

John Oliver

You

Done

" I have exactly as much rhythm as you think I have. "

" The British press are a group of unremitting scumbags. And sometimes they use that scumbaggery to good ends, and often not. "

" People are friendlier in New York than London. "

" People in Britain see Richard Quest as a kind of an offensive cartoon character. "

" I'm British; pessimism is my wheelhouse. "

John Oliver

British

Pessimism

" As any Brit will understand, things get a little easier when you don't have to be number one any more. Really, the fall of an empire is not as bad as everyone thinks. It's like retirement. People fear retirement, but it can turn out be rather pleasant. "

" My family is from Liverpool, so I have some of those vowel sounds, I've got the slack tone of someone from Birmingham, and then I was raised in Bedford, which is just north of London. So my accent, if it's possible, makes even less sense to a Brit than to an American. "

" My first 'Daily Show' piece was pretending I had this terrible immigrant journey, so I went to talk to an immigration lawyer who would help out people, and I ran into him in Penn Station about three months after I'd gotten the green card. I said, 'I got my green card yesterday.' And he hugged me because he understood that level of relief. "

" Campaign ads are the backbone of American democracy if American democracy suffered a gigantic spinal injury. "

" We in Britain stopped evolving gastronomically with the advent of the pie. Everything beyond that seemed like a brave, frightening new world. We knew the French were up to something across the Channel, but we didn't want anything to do with it. "

" I've made so many people angry that they kind of blur into one unpleasant memory of people staring at you with somewhere between passive aggression and active aggression. "

" I think puns are not just the lowest form of wit, but the lowest form of human behavior. "

" I'm not really much of an actor, so when I started on 'The Daily Show,' I was just trying to adopt the faux authority of a newsperson. Having a British accent definitely gave me a sonic leg up on that because there is a faux authority to the British accent in and of itself. "

John Oliver

Actor

Authority

" Congress never loses its capacity to disappoint you. "