Jimmy Carr

The tragedy for comedians is there's nothing more they want than to be liked. We desperately seek approval. It's almost like a personality disorder you can do as a job.

Even if you're doing the national insurance awards, there's still that excitement when you wonder who is going to win, er, best premiums.

Staying in luxury hotels still gives me a kick, especially Oulton Hall in Yorkshire. I'd stay in a hotel for the breakfast and room service.

You go, well you can't joke about race. Well if you're from a different race and that's your experience of the world and you want to talk about that, then fine. Or you can't talk about disability, but disabled comics can talk about that.

I was a Christian. I didn't want to have sex before marriage, I was a bit uptight and not very self-confident. I was a virgin until I was 26.

I was in love with the idea of being in love with a woman way before I was actually in love with one.

It's so clear cut with a comedian - you have that reflex action, whereby you laugh or you don't. And so you either love us or you simply cannot see why people are laughing.

I didn't plan to be the rude middle-class comedian. You write a certain type of joke that you find funny, and mine happen to be often rude. Yes, it's juvenile, but that's me.

As soon as I did my first five minutes of stand-up I knew that I would rather be a failure at comedy than a success in marketing.

The bigger the audience, the better with comedy.

More people are going out to comedy shows than they were before.

They say the people most affected by the credit crunch are pensioners - well, let go of the handbag then, Nanna.