Stewart Lee

Comedian

1968-04-05

Quotes by Stewart Lee

• What's happened is somewhere, along the line, as a society, we confused the notion of 'home' with the possibility of 'an investment opportunity'. What kind of creature wants to live in an 'investment opportunity'? Only man.The fox has his den. The bee has his hive. The stoat, has, uh... his stoat-hole... but only man chooses to make his nest in an investment opportunity. Mmm, snuggled down in the lovely credit! All warm, in the mortgage payment, mmmmm...

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• Did you slip in some cheese? Did it make you hate cheese, which you had previously loved? Why not sue a cheese-maker? Sue him for all the cheese he's got, drive him out of the cheese-making business!Did you burn your face with an iron? Why not sue Prometheus, the god that invented fire? Or an Iron Age chieftain, for having the temerity to popularise the metal.

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• What's happened is somewhere, along the line, as a society, we confused the notion of 'home' with the possibility of 'an investment opportunity'. What kind of creature wants to live in an 'investment opportunity'? Only man.The fox has his den. The bee has his hive. The stoat, has, uh... his stoat-hole... but only man chooses to make his nest in an investment opportunity. Mmm, snuggled down in the lovely credit! All warm, in the mortgage payment, mmmmm...

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• Did you slip in some cheese? Did it make you hate cheese, which you had previously loved? Why not sue a cheese-maker? Sue him for all the cheese he's got, drive him out of the cheese-making business!Did you burn your face with an iron? Why not sue Prometheus, the god that invented fire? Or an Iron Age chieftain, for having the temerity to popularise the metal.

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• I am not comparing myself to great artists, but when you see conceptual artists at work, on some level it's reassuring to know they can paint figuratively. Likewise, when you listen to the '50s jazz people who do these vast solos, you buy into it more if they open by playing a tune.

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• I'm very grateful to my adoptive family. My mother sorted my life out.

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• I don't think I'd want to be a comedian today if I saw it on the telly. I wouldn't think it was a thing for weirdoes and drop-outs; I'd think it was a thing for squares who wanted to be famous.

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• Normally, when I write a tour show, it's got a title that means something - a beginning, a middle and an end - and some kind of storyline and ideas going through it over two hours.

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• For other comics, it's about full-spectrum dominance, being on panel shows and having one-liners and being a good chat show guest and having a good seven minutes you can do on 'Live At The Apollo.' But I really think about these subsequent finished pieces, you know? And they don't always chop up well into one-liners and routines.

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• It's interesting to me that apparently distasteful comments from the Right against weak targets tend to draw a lot less media fire than apparently distasteful comments from the Left against hard targets. That's one of the threads that runs through the show and that people hopefully pick up on.

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• I've now got a 35,000-word document of quotes from people who hate me, a lot from the 'Guardian' comment threads. Mostly, I've managed to get myself into the mindset where the criticism is quite affirming.

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• I grew up in Solihull, on the edge of what was then the Birmingham conurbation. It was a good place to write comedy from. I didn't feel allegiance to anything. I didn't have working-class pride or upper-class superiority.

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