Paul Merton Quotes & Sayings

“When I wake up on a Monday morning and I realise I don't have to go and work at the civil service, I really think I've won.”

“My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the misery I've endured over the past twenty-five years.”

“The thing about improvisation is that it's not about what you say. It's listening to what other people say. It's about what you hear.”

“Maybe there's a perception of me as grumpy old bugger who suffers from depression. It's a total misconception. I don't think of myself as any grumpier than the next person. I'm not even grumpy first thing in the morning.”

“I'm always amazed to hear of air crash victims so badly mutilated that they have to be identified by their dental records. What I can't understand is, if they don't know who you are, how do they know who your dentist is?”

“When things are difficult, awful, stressful, the thing that always gets you through is a sense of humour. I don't mean - well, maybe I do - laugh at the hangman as he puts the noose around your neck. But an eye, an ear, for the ridiculous, the absurd in life, can get you through a lot.”

“It was a bizarre existence I led in my early twenties - that cliche of the comedian who goes out and entertains a roomful of people and then goes home to a lonely bedsit was unbelievably poignant for me because that was exactly what I was doing. I had periods of real loneliness.”

“In a psychiatric hospital, a lot of people believe that people on TV are talking to them directly through the screen. I'm with about 500 of these people, and I'm on TV every Friday night. As I was queuing up for breakfast one morning, one guy nearly jumped out of his skin. My first thought was to go 'Woooo!'”

“When I turned about 12 or 13, I realised that being funny wasn't about remembering jokes. It was about creating them.”

“If you became a comedian in the '80s, you had to work the circuit and make people laugh. Canned laughter is cheating.”