Top 40 Alexei Sayle Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it’s safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.”

— Alexei Sayle

2. “But as in all cults, what’s central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you’re very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.”

— Alexei Sayle

3. “Even a blind dog can find a bone every so often.”

— Alexei Sayle

4. “This is the band Radical Posture, and my name is Alexei Yuri Gagarin Siege of Stalingrad Glorious Five-Year Plan Sputnik Pravda Moscow Dynamo Back Four Balowski. Me Dad was a bit of a Communist, know what I mean?”

— Alexei Sayle

5. “Honestly, sometimes I get really fed up of my subconscious – it’s like it’s got a mind of its own.”

— Alexei Sayle

6. “If I won the lottery I’d start a charity that helped little family hardware stores, cobblers and fruit shops open in city centres.”

— Alexei Sayle

7. “There’s a part of me that still hates everything, and my natural view default setting is still very cynical and dark.”

— Alexei Sayle

8. “Also a fan of being inscrutable, Franco once said, ‘You are a the slave of what you say and the master of what you don’t say.’ He might have added that that approach isn’t always guaranteed to work. If you attempt, for example, to be sphinx-like, mysterious and enigmatic when you get to the front of a long queue at the chip shop, you do risk being punched quite hard in the back of the head.”

— Alexei Sayle

9. “However, my problems with my memory are further complicated by the fact that while I don’t have any recollection of things I have actually done, I have very vivid recollections of loads of things that I haven’t done.”

— Alexei Sayle

10. “Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, may have had his charms, but he really couldn’t be considered hip.”

— Alexei Sayle

11. “I’ve been going to Granada for many years and 12 years ago bought a house a few miles outside the city.”

— Alexei Sayle

12. “You can’t do comedy with a beard.”

— Alexei Sayle

13. “For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting – you want to tell people something they don’t know about.”

— Alexei Sayle

14. “I like the south of Spain, notably for the Moorish influence and the weather.”

— Alexei Sayle

15. “I always thought communism was crap, really.”

— Alexei Sayle

16. “First off, I have to mention what is undoubtedly the greatest phenomenon of the modern era: All You Can Eat Buffets.”

— Alexei Sayle

17. “I wanted to write about how people’s beliefs shift.”

— Alexei Sayle

18. “If someone starts agreeing with me, I don’t like it. Out of pique, I become something else.”

— Alexei Sayle

19. “Now, as a comic, if you’re vaguely amusing you can go straight into TV, then you play the O2 and then everyone’s sick of you.”

— Alexei Sayle

20. “I have a lot of nice Italian winter clothes that make me look like a sophisticated Lebanese professor, so my friend Robert and I go around pretending to be experts in Arabic politics. It doesn’t work in the summer though. I don’t have the right clothes.”

— Alexei Sayle

21. “The optimum frequency with which comedians should do a series is every year. I do one every three years. My audience is literally dying off.”

— Alexei Sayle

22. “A lot of those comics can’t hold down relationships and they’ve got no other life apart from performing. They sleep in their Jags and a lot of them can’t even talk. All they can do is tell gags.”

— Alexei Sayle

23. “I suppose the common idea of me is that I’m going to be someone who’s hyper and cracking jokes all the time, but people who meet me are soon disabused of that notion.”

— Alexei Sayle

24. “Most of the Communists I knew were nice people.”

— Alexei Sayle

25. “I feel sorry for many politicians we expect them to be completely consistent and moralised when we’re not.”

— Alexei Sayle

26. “Everyone I used to work with is still alive and can afford expensive lawyers.”

— Alexei Sayle

27. “I liked 35 and in both my novels that is the age of the lead characters. I tried making them my age but they just seemed to keep moaning about stuff.”

— Alexei Sayle

28. “I think that my ideas of the world are that it’s random and cruel but kind of quite comical really, and therefore the humour, in a sense, springs from that.”

— Alexei Sayle

29. “If sitcoms were easy to write, there’d be a lot of good ones, and there aren’t.”

— Alexei Sayle

30. “It always seemed to be a constant that my parents were political.”

— Alexei Sayle

31. “People used to think I was just a shouty comic but I was doing stuff about Sartre.”

— Alexei Sayle

32. “I don’t think people were that interested in what I was doing for the most of the 1990s.”

— Alexei Sayle

33. “I exist as an annexe of the BBC. I’m down the road a bit from the main building, in a little hut.”

— Alexei Sayle

34. “I don’t think I’d ever get thin, but I don’t see why I should necessarily think that I couldn’t You can’t live your life for your routines.”

— Alexei Sayle

35. “I’m sure a psychologist would see something highly significant in how absent-minded I am. I mean I’d forget my head if it wasn’t attached to my neck by muscles, ligaments and my esophagus.”

— Alexei Sayle

36. “Most of my friends are women – I quite fancied being a woman in a way.”

— Alexei Sayle

37. “People aren’t universally heroic.”

— Alexei Sayle

38. “It seems easier to make a career out of comedy now than it was in the 1980s.”

— Alexei Sayle

39. “I did six series for the BBC and that was enough. I’ve been writing for ten years, which is more challenging artistically.”

— Alexei Sayle

40. “As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.”

— Alexei Sayle