Explore Quotes by Bill Bailey

People perceive me as this kind of hippy intellectual, reflecting and communing with nature or in a pyramid somewhere chanting. Really, no. I love speed, fast things, quad and road bikes, and bombing down a mountain.

But being in 'Doctor Who' is a dream come true. I've been a fan since I can remember watching TV.

I was asked to do an ad campaign for a supermarket once. I was baffled. It's strange when you realise your popularity or reputation is a marketable commodity; it's a stock, a currency.

There was an existential moment - I don't know if I want to call it crisis - when I turned 50 and I felt 'this is interesting; how did this happen?' It affected me in a way I wasn't expecting. It made me pause for reflection.

My grandfather had strong opinions. He was an argumentative character and quite staunchly socialist.

I was asked to perform at the Olympics Opening Ceremony. But I was up a tree in Borneo filming a documentary about Alfred Russel Wallace! So it couldn't be done.

If you become famous but haven't actually achieved anything, then your life has no real meaning - unless you're spectacularly shallow.

There was something about stand-up that music wouldn't give me, which was my love of the spoken word and the mercurial tendency of language to respond to what happens to you.

I've always been envious of certainty, of people who always seemed to have a plan for their lives.

I play the piano and that's how I learned about music. I then taught myself the guitar, drums, percussion and various other things, such as the bazooka, the mandolin, the Theremin, the alpine horn, the didgeridoo.

I think gaming has influenced popular culture in a huge way. It's worked its way into novels, and blockbuster movies.

Twenty-two years I've been doing this comedy lark, so it's been like a meteoric rise to fame... if the meteor was being dragged by an arthritic donkey across a ploughed field, in northern Poland.

I'm one for new things: I like new technology, I like new music, I'm not entrenched in some view of what culture should be. I like the fact that it's constantly changing and that language is changing, that behaviour changes.

It's a lovely moment when everyone's part of something greater than the sum of its parts. That encapsulates what a comedy gig should be, with the comic as the lightning rod, the Norse mischief god, getting the audience to do something they wouldn't necessarily do.

I hate all those celebrity sculptures like Tussauds, where everyone is dressed in spangly suits and they are all smiling.

Doing comedy around the world is a way of finding out how people tick.

I was an only child but I never longed for a sibling. It just didn't occur to me.

I have anti-establishment hair.

I had this plan that David Byrne was going to come through the West Country one day, think, 'Who's that guy?' and ask me to go on tour with them.

Some musicians are a bit humourless about their art: they lose sight of the fact that as well as exercising their muse, they're there to entertain.

It's been Bill for so long people think my name is William, but it's not, it's Mark.