Stewart Lee

"I thought it would be a funny concept to publish a book about stand-up comedy with Faber, the poetry publisher, and to apply to stand-up the same sort of weight of annotation that you would to a classic work of literature, an epic poem. I thought that would be funny."

"My grandad always said, "You should never judge a book by its cover." And it's for that reason that he lost his job as chair of the British Book Cover Awards panel."

"What's happened is somewhere, along the line, as a society, we confused the notion of 'home' with the possibility of 'an investment opportunity'. What kind of creature wants to live in an 'investment opportunity'? Only man. The fox has his den. The bee has his hive. The stoat, has, uh... his stoat-hole... but only man chooses to make his nest in an investment opportunity. Mmm, snuggled down in the lovely credit! All warm, in the mortgage payment, mmmmm..."

"Did you slip in some cheese? Did it make you hate cheese, which you had previously loved? Why not sue a cheese-maker? Sue him for all the cheese he's got, drive him out of the cheese-making business!Did you burn your face with an iron? Why not sue Prometheus, the god that invented fire? Or an Iron Age chieftain, for having the temerity to popularise the metal."