John Oliver

The death penalty is like the McRib. When you can’t have it, it seems so tantalizing. But when they bring it back, you think, ‘Wow, this is ethically wrong’.

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.

But it’s been 114 years. It’s like for over a century, America’s computer’s been saying, An update to your country is available and we’ve been clicking Remind me later again and again and again.

British politics, when done well, can be very fun. John Oliver

[reacting to George Zimmerman’s acquittal] I think it might honestly be time for the Sunshine State to officially change its motto to the Worst State.

Oh but I’m serious this time. Take your American history books, burn them in the streets, they’re worthless after Tuesday. Why? The senate is up for grabs. I repeat – the f**king senate is up for grabs!

I like listening to good music – and I can’t stop playing my album.

When humor works, it works because it’s clarifying what people already feel. It has to come from someplace real. You don’t just decide to destroy a person by making up stuff, and no one at SNL is writing to go after someone.

I’ve never done a romantic comedy, because it seems they can’t just tell a love story. It’s always something like a radio station does a poll and decides these two people will get along, and if they do they get a million dollars. You don’t need all of that to get into a love story.

My defenses were so great. The cocky rock and roll hero who knows all the answers was actually a terrified guy who didn’t know how to cry. Simple.

When I started, I never gave any thought whatsoever to what I would be doing when I was 70.

I see two or three cars that are really good, but they’re not dominant. There’s usually somebody who’s got one that’s a little bit better than everybody.

[on drumming] There’s something rather nice about spending the evening hitting things.

Do the NBC bigheads really pay attention to these message boards? Um, I don’t know if they read the message boards. I hope so, because I write fifty to a thousand fake posts a week, mostly, uh, saying that I’m really good and that no else is as good as me. So, I hope they listen to that because I’m trying to get a raise.

A lot of them also looked a little further down the line in the future than we did. We always did everything out of Level Cross (N.C.) in the backyard and we were fairly successful with the thing. Then it started being a bigger and bigger business. It started going and bringing more people in, more money, more technology, that kind of stuff. We still sat there in the backyard. By the time we got ready to do something about it, we were so far behind on our money and our engineering and all that stuff it’s just taken us a little time to get going.

This Velvet Mafia thing is just another homophobic, nasty kind of thing that jealous queens make up.

I’m not that good looking… nobody is that good looking. I have seen a lot of movie stars, and maybe four are amazing looking. The rest have a team of gay guys who make it happen.

I made my life ambitious and big and crazy, and basically now I am the helmsman of this mad affair, and I need to take stock. I write these songs, and I live and die in the middle of them, but I can’t really tell you the truth about me, cause I don’t know what it is. It’s a f***ing great journey but it doesn’t all smell of roses.

I have no enabler bone in my body – not one. I’m sort of like, ‘Oh, are you going crazy? I’ll be back in an hour.’

When it’s not your gig, you’re like, ‘I’m just gonna go to bed!’

Contrary to popular myth, I didn’t just hatch out of an eagle’s nest, circa One Million Years B.C., clad in a doe-skin bikini. In fact, I was more surprised than anyone to find myself on location in such an exotic setting, high atop a volcanic mountain in the Canary Islands! With the release of that famous movie poster, in one fell swoop, everything in my life changed and everything about the real me was swept away. All else would be eclipsed by this bigger-than-life sex symbol.