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" I'm Irish, yeah, but I don't need to get up on a soapbox about it. "

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" I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir. "

" Home gigs can be hard because it's an odd collision. More than anything, I feel self-conscious when my family are in the audience. I'm doing this job which is not quite acting - part of it is me, part performance. You're presenting a cartoon of yourself to people who know you as a line-drawing. "

" Stand-up came naturally to me because people in Ireland talk. But that's not talking on panel shows; it is structured fun. It reminds me of some tragic aunt clapping her hands and bouncing into a room and announcing we should all play games... and if we don't we are all a rotten spoilsport. "

" If I hadn't done this I might have ended up digging the roads. "

" Children are the most honest critics. They will say 'You're funny', but also 'You're pathetic - go away.' "

" You can't please everyone, nor should you seek to, because then you won't please anyone, least of all yourself. "

" The terror of failure can make you feel like a failure. So a bunch of people think you're not very good at your thing. How much do you invest in what they say? How much do you care? Failure is not putting yourself on the line. "

" I don't know that you're able to measure your aggregate wisdom as you go through life. I can't say that I ever feel that I'm sitting on top of a growing mound of wisdom. "

" I write all the time, but you just want to be careful what you put out. That's all. You want to have the confidence that you've done what you need to do to it, because otherwise it's an exercise in vanity. "

" I'm delighted to make as many people feel ashamed as possible. There's probably a site like that for everybody. I've heard Newt Gingrich has his own as well. "

" I don't go to different countries to criticise their political system and tell them what they should be doing - what do I know? "

" Some people have told me that I'm grumpy; it's not something that I'm aware of. It's not like I walk around poking children in the eye... not very small ones, anyway. "

" I grew up in a house where there was lots of teasing and language play and laughter; it was very important. When I was a teenager, you wouldn't go to a bar and find lots of televisions everywhere. People were talking. Talk was the mental fire you would gather around in the evening. It occupied a big part of your existence. "

" I wouldn't be in a huge hurry to go back to Kansas. It was just bizarre. There's a lot of very, very heavy set people who believe in whatever they were told, because they didn't seem to get out very much or be interested in leaving where they were. They just didn't seem that curious, and I find that a little hard to deal with. "

" The measure of a conversation is how much mutual recognition there is in it; how much shared there is in it. If you're talking about what's in your own head, or without thought to what people looking and listening will feel, you might as well be in a room talking to yourself. "

" When I was a child, I wanted to watch things that made me laugh. It's attacking boredom, as simple as that. I was 19 when I first went to a comedy club - I wanted to do it, so I gave it a try and that was it. I found my office. "

" Lots of comics try stuff out all year round, which is very sensible - I don't. "

" I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I'll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets. "

" I'm organised in some ways, but not in others. "

" The characters can't be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty. "

" I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself. "

" I suppose the best comedy shows do have the rock n' roll feeling - if it's a great night, and the roof is raised... yeah, it's a similar feeling, sure. "

" You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic. "

" I get a phone call once every 18 months from some mad person who wants me to do something for less than no money and they give me about a week's notice. That's my film career, most of the time. "

" I would never really analyse what I do. I leave that to other people - I'm not a critic. I just want to get on with whatever I have in hand, you know? Just try to make the best job of the available material. "

" I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine. "

" There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens. "

" A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention. "

" I thought The Office was good, though I didn't think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme. "

" I'd be hard-pressed to think of anybody who's made me laugh, who's funny, but who's also relentlessly positive. "