“I will absolutely say that whatever job I was asked to do, whatever schedule I was asked to work, it is never going to be as hard as looking after a child.”
“Any degree of success or achievement for me is only ever a relief. My version of getting carried away is: 'Mmm, that wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.'”
“How nice it would be to breeze through life and just brush things off. I never read reviews because I hate to lose more than I like to win; I experience negative emotions far greater than positive ones.”
“I don't know why, but people tend to look at stand-ups and think they can act, which actually isn't the case. But never mind. I thought: if that's the area where they're looking, then that's the area where I'll put myself - even as a means to an end. And it was.”
“I tried four times to get into the Central School of Speech and Drama before I got accepted. I started when I was 17, which was too young, in retrospect, and finally went when I was 21. I just kept plugging away. Determined? Yeah, I think I was.”
“I went from an unemployed actor's life to doing stand-up comedy, and that was fortuitous. It's not the usual way the crow flies, going from being in a TV sketch show to playing one of Shakespeare's finest characters, but, hey, that's the way it has happened.”
“I've never really thought I'd get married. It's not that I'm suspicious of it or anything like that, it's just that I don't have a reference for it because my mum wasn't.”
“If I hadn't had a baby, a part of me thinks I might have turned up on the red carpets all the time and gone, 'Hi, it's me!' Maybe other people do it because they haven't got kids and they've nowhere else to be. But because I have, I don't feel like that.”
“It's never been a point of reference to look to a man. It's not always a good thing, I suppose, but I think independence is always preferable to dependence.”
“My mum left my dad when I was six months old, so I don't know him at all. I had no male figures in my life, really. I had my godfather, but he's more like a grandfather, so I was quite sheltered. I've never tried to find my father.”