"I am a one success man."

"Not only don't I know who I am, but I'm very suspicious of people who do know who they are. I am sometimes ten or twelve people a day, and sometimes four or five people an hour!"

"Most drama in our lives is really rather squalid."

"I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who, it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring."

"Actors are able to trick themselves into treating anything as if it's fantastic. It's a kind of madness really."

"Politicians are just Daily Mail journalists writ large, aren't they? They're always telling us what's going to happen, and we know they don't know!"

"I'm obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience. But my feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness."

"I never examined what I did in any great detail because I thought it would spoil things. I never read the scripts at all carefully, and never wanted to know what was going on, because I felt that being a benevolent alien that's the way it should be."

"We have newsreaders behaving like actors, lowering their voices if it's a sad story, as if we didn't know it's a sad story. There isn't a single cool newsreader."

"I think quite often a fate worse than death is life - for lots of people."