John Oliver

In the last series, we set up a church [to expose televangelists and the ease of avoiding tax through establishing a religious organisation]. It took a lot of legal advice and months of gathering correspondence with one pastor. In terms of the UK, I’m not sure what the Inland Revenue’s position on churches is. The IRS is very much of the opinion that all churches, whatever their form, operate tax free. How would I make sense of what we achieved? We achieved nothing! We achieved $70,000 in single [donations], a four-foot wooden penis and five vials of human sperm. Although a lot of people would consider that a decent year’s work, I suppose. It’s a pretty impressive room full of tat.

Because sex is like boxing, if one of the parties didn’t agree to participate, the other one is committing a crime.

Whatever the occasion, [the Queen] has a face which demonstrably says ‘I don’t give a royal s**t.’

Florida, just because you’re shaped like some combination of a gun and a d*ck doesn’t mean you have to act that way.

Trump is like a magic eight-ball; every time you shake him he gives you a different answer, and sometimes the answer is just ‘big-league’ or ‘that’s some body on my daughter, right?’

Elections: the only excuse for a grown man to kiss a stranger’s baby and not have the cops called.

The second I met Zac Efron I thought he was a really cool guy. It’s hard not to have chemistry with someone who is quite attractive.

I might get mad all over again watching our premiere.

Confidence is key. Sometimes, you need to look like you’re confident even when you’re not.

Time is the best teacher, but unfortunately, it kills all of its students.

According to current Florida law you can get a gun, follow an unarmed minor, call the police, have them explicitly tell you to stop following [the minor] and choose to ignore that, keep following the minor, get into a confrontation with them, and if at any point during that process you get scared you can shoot the minor to death, and the state of Florida will say, ‘Well, look: you did what you could.’

The sweetest thing a guy said is that I look pretty with or without makeup.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don’t know anything.

Tell her: jealousy is a disease, die slow.

I’ve been watching what I eat. When I was putting on all the weight, I was drinking Guinness and not eating. I didn’t have room to because I was drinking all the time.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me.

[On roles resembling the title character in ‘Penelope’] I like this girl because she is a bit of a bad-ass. I grew up watching movies with people like Barbara Stanwyck, and sometimes I get frustrated that there aren’t a lot of great female characters out there that young women can look at and go, ‘I want to be like that’. I go to movies and yell at the women on-screen, ‘Shoot him; just shoot him.’ I mean, why why does the guy always have to shoot him?

I always get carried away when I’m kissing. I just go nuts! Walking away after it is the strangest moment for me. It’s embarrassing – not knowing what to say to each other.

At least when the race starts, he’ll know where they’re all at because they’ll all be in front of him.

Trump is like a magic eight-ball; every time you shake him he gives you a different answer, and sometimes the answer is just ‘big-league’ or ‘that’s some body on my daughter, right?’

Anything that we think is incredible and beautiful and wonderful, we ascribe to something that we don’t know what it is.