Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by David Baddiel - Page 2

Football fandom is this, it's magical thinking, it's hope over experience.

Fame is a silly thing that makes your life absurd.

My mum's death was appalling.

I don't believe in God, so I'd say that laughter is one of the only true weapons for fighting against real darkness, grief and loss.

I've met a lot of people who follow me on Twitter but I've never met anyone who has trolled me.

When I retweet a troll, I'm not thinking of the troll, I'm thinking of the audience: how can I make them laugh with me, at him?

My father worked for Unilever, running a mass-spectrometry lab - mass spectrometry is a process for elucidating the chemical structures of molecules, which means that he presided over a legal form of corporate espionage, breaking down the component parts of competitors' products in order to copy them.

The food in central Asia is not so great: it tends to be horse.

I was always very against the idea that for comedy to be 'important' it has to be dark. It's very much a critic's way of thinking.

I only work with the ideas I have. I only want to talk about stuff that happens to me.

Vegas felt glamorous on the outside but disappointing on the inside.

We're not designed to know hundreds of people - we're designed to know four people in our village. So the only way we can know hundreds of people is by reducing them to a stamp of their identity.

I am someone who is going to say what I want to say.

Fame doesn't allow for complexity, especially complexity of character.

People think making jokes about something is just going to cause trouble. But actually, not making jokes about something is a type - and this sounds very pretentious - of apartheid.

When I was growing up I don't think Muslims and Jews were considered to be opposites.

My dad was a scientist. More than that: my dad grew up in a tiny terraced house in Swansea, the only child of a second-generation immigrant family - his father sold cloth, zips and buttons from door to door - and so science - biochemistry at Swansea University, followed by a PhD at Imperial College - was his way out, his way up.

With the Kick It Out campaign, I was interested in asking: 'Why is antisemitism a lesser racism than other racisms?' I genuinely believe that to be the case - that negative stuff said against Jews isn't considered that important.

We are all frightened now. No one says anything public without looking over their shoulder and wondering, Have I said something wrong? Am I going to get in trouble?

I'm incredibly uncommitted to party politics. I vote Labour but only because Glenda Jackson was my MP and I loved her on 'Morecambe & Wise.'

I don't believe in God but I do believe in Larry David.

Three Lions' is a song about loss: about the fact that England mainly lose.

My show 'Fame: Not the Musical' is about the fact that fame is seen in two ways in our culture: either as a glittering bauble we desperately covet, or as a narrative of tragedy and despair. My own experience of fame is a third, mundane way, which often involves being mistaken for someone else - Ian Broudie from the Lightning Seeds, or Steve Wright.

Everything I do is storytelling; storytelling is about curiosity.

My parents are very unusual characters, both of them - they're both only children, and they're great, but neither of them are the sort of standard idea of a parent, and not of Jewish parents.

I think I have a problem. I'm incredibly open about myself.

I tend to feed the trolls because it gives me material for my work. I'm sometimes taken aback by the racist and antisemitic abuse I get, but most of the time I'll get angry for a second, and then remind myself, 'This is material.' The trick is not to be too reactive.

When you get older, you are told constantly that you should be there for your parents' deaths, otherwise you will regret it. But what we are not prepared for is a sudden, brutal death that you are there for, with medical people shouting and things bleeping and your parent gasping for breath.

I had a 'the Cure' hairstyle, bigger even than Robert Smith's for many years. I used to do jokes about it which went well, but which meant I had to keep sporting it long after it was fashionable.

I spend a lot of time on social media and people ask me if the abuse I get is upsetting, but working in comedy has built up my skin - I'm used to hecklers.

I like trolls. Some trolling I find very entertaining. The sheer abuse can be hilarious, and so random and absurd.

I spent a long time on a big studio sitcom, 'Baddiel's Syndrome,' for Sky, and got no audience.

All the things I've done mean something to me.

I think it is quite hard to be as angry and abusive face to face as it is online. But my fear is that as we get more and more normalised to abuse online, it will start spreading away from the screen.

In between being born in Nazi Germany, and marriage to my dad - of which I think marriage to my dad might have been worse - my mother had a very difficult and complicated life.

I have an issue with classical music.

I'm very committed to anti-racism and gender equality - political issues, but not party political.

I've been aware of my own mortality since I was 12.

I don't think comedians are better travellers but they are communicators and storytellers.

I certainly don't think comedians are more depressive than any other walk of life. I have had clinical depression, as it happens. The stress of performing didn't help, but it wasn't about being a comedian in itself.

Clever, witty and absorbing, Amortality is a much-needed anatomy of our profound malaise about ageing. Its charms will never fade.

For a long time, I used to think that I had a man's brain that I thought more like a man than a woman. But now I've come to realise that whatever it is I do think like, it's not like men; because men don't really think like men, they think like boys.