Jimmy Carr

"All comedians are a bit attention-seeking and I'm no different. Anyone with the audacity to want to be listened to for an hour and a half must be."

"To me, my approach is the most sensible. You're a comic. Therefore you want to get laughs. How do you get the most laughs in an hour? Tell short jokes. And don't say boom boom at the end. Just let the audience laugh then tell another joke. It's the shortest route to where you want to go."

"My writing process is editing. It's taking all the funny thoughts you've had over the last 12 months, and editing out everything that's shit. You're left with an hour and a quarter of funny stuff."

"I think that comedians, more than any other type of celebrity, have to keep their humour and keep their feet on the ground. If they start taking themselves too seriously, they're heading for a fall."

"I love those people who do story-telling and who ramble on, but I don't do that, I tell jokes - the sort of jokes that anyone really could tell in the pub."

"As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing."

"I literally can't believe my luck. Torturing Americans should not only be easy, but a pleasure!"

"I'm a stand-up. And no one on the circuit's terribly impressed if you're on TV. I suppose I've stolen my ethos from Jay Leno. You can do all the TV in the world, but that's a team game, and anyone can be dropped from the squad. And if you haven't gigged in a while, you're not firing, you're not match fit. So I try and do it whenever I can."

"TV's not the same buzz. If someone tells you three million people watched the show last week, that's good but, when you walk out in front of 1,000, you think, 'Oh my God, this had better be good'."

"I did quite a lot of TV shows over the latter half of 2004 - all those 100 Greatest and 100 Worst and all that kind of stuff. So I was a little bit overexposed. But I think you need to do that once in your career, and that's how you become famous. You get overexposed once, and then people know your name and you can relax a bit."

"The great thing about being a comedian is that it kind of doesn't matter how you look. It's actually a disadvantage to be too good-looking. There's a Darwinian advantage to being funny. If you're a good-looking fella, you can't be bothered to make up jokes."

"So they've laughed and then they've thought, should we have laughed at that? Well, too late now. You did. I imagine I get more than my fair share of that."

"Jokes spread around the world and embed themselves in our shared culture; the most resonant of them get lodged in the language in the same way as clichés or old wives' tales do."

"But what's true about comedians is that we've all got a huge hole in our personality. In a room of 3,000 people, we're the one person facing in the opposite direction - yet we have this overwhelming desire to be liked."

"I immediately adored performing. It really empowers you when everyone's laughing. It gives you an immense buzz. You just feel on top of the world."

"I think being successful in comedy is being funny and making jokes - anything beyond that is the icing on the cake."

"If only Africa had more mosquito nets then every year we could save millions of mosquitoes from dying needlessly of AIDs."

"As head of the Catholic church, Pope Benedict is the boss of every Catholic priest in the world, he's effectively king of the pedos."

"The highest terrorist threat level, as we all know, is “I don't care if this does look racist, I'm getting off the bus... That backpack is huge and he doesn't need to be saying his prayers.”"

"When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of 6 million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of Gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives."

"His idea of wit is a barrage of filth and the sort of humour most men grow out of in their teens."

"He's basically the only comedian on telly at the moment and the rest of us are all jealous."