“I love the way my weight fluctuates in the newspapers. It was 18 stone and then people look at a bad picture of me and add a few more stone on. I think the highest was 22 stone.”
“In credits, I'm 'Michael' sometimes now, but people know you as something, so there's no point fighting it. 'Squiggle,' you'll always be 'Prince,' and 'The Rock,' just accept it. I want to move on, but not that much. So I'm still known as 'Johnny Vegas.'”
“There have been times I've finished a big job and thought, 'Great, a couple of weeks off.' But then a couple of weeks turns to three weeks and then after a month you're staring at the phone willing it to ring.”
“There was always that thing with 'Johnny' - I always saw myself as his writer and PR. But when he got out there, I had no control. His whole thing was going off on those flights of fancy. Going, 'Let's see what we can possibly do that hasn't been done before up here.' And when it works, it's lovely; it's a great night.”
“Writing a book about yourself is like therapy, and you go 'Oh My God, that's the reason that happened.' Writing about it, you're forced to really examine things.”
“Being 'Johnny' was almost like an out of body experience. I thought he was just a character that I'd created and could quite easily step away from, but it was much more difficult than that.”
“I think it sort of dawns on you that if you're not gigging constantly you're not actually relevant. You may be relevant to a different part of the media now, to television commissioners and editors, but to a young live-comedy audience you're not, really.”
“I've always said that with kids' TV that people get stuck in it from drama school but that's not fair because I know myself that when you go in creatively, kids are so much more open to ideas. You're so much freer to mess about and try things.”
“There's lots of stuff about me being a fan of Cliff but not being gay. Which suggests that he is, but he's not. Anyway, this is Channel 4, let their lawyers sort it out.”