John Oliver

I don’t know how you explain Piers Morgan back to Americans now. I don’t think he ever intended for America to be his home, and there’s a difference between criticising the place you have come to call home and the place you have come to live in for a bit. Ideally, on the Venn diagram between myself and Piers there would be no overlap whatsoever, on either a personal or professional level. If we could be two non-interlocking circles I’d be fine with that. Any comparison with him makes me want to challenge you to a duel.

If we don’t get actively involved to at least mitigate Trump’s damage, things will not be OK. And yes, the sun will rise each day, but the continuing rotation of the earth should not be your baseline expectation of American society.

Trump’s presidency is like one of his handshakes: it pulls you in whether you like it or not.

Calling Jeremy Corbyn the ‘British Bernie Sanders’ would be very reductive, very simplistic and probably the best way to explain him to Americans, while being wildly inaccurate. As for Corbyn and Sanders, I think we’ll have to wait and see whether being principled actually gets you anywhere. I don’t think you can doubt the tenacity of their beliefs. But can you translate that into power?

Student debt is like HPV – if you go to college, you are most likely to get it, and it will follow you for the rest of your life.

An iPhone would be a more coherent president of the United States.

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

I think for women especially, you need to have a plan. I need to have some other ways to generate income, so I don’t have to stretch my face or lift the top of my head with surgery or something.

Definitely tougher to be vulnerable. As a woman in the industry, you try so hard to remain strong and to not let your guard down. And once you let the walls down and let people see that you were a regular person who has feelings, sometimes people take advantage of that. I think that applies for everyone. It’s always a little bit nerve-racking to just completely let your guard down because you just don’t know if people are going to appreciate it. And then if they don’t appreciate it, you can feel like you did it in vain.

I don’t take myself that seriously. I’ve just had a good, big life. It’s a big one.

Paramount sent them nine-foot-high (theater lobby) cutouts of me. They say, “You don’t have to come home, we’ve got you in every room of the house!”

There were the Pussycat Dolls, and there’s a band called Perfect Pussy, but they’re white, so they get the pass. I can’t be Junglepussy and black, but I just push through, especially when my mother says she doesn’t have a problem with it.

I couldn`t stand that my husband was being unfaithful. I am Raquel Welch – understand?

Parisian men make love all day and have no time to work; American men work all day and have no time for love.

They made me use an accent, which I wasn’t thrilled about because a lot of us, obviously, don’t have them.

The Lion King always makes me cry, especially when Simba’s father gets trampled.

[On working with Woody Allen] That was a very surreal experience: I had studied the script right down to the punctuation marks, and then he would say ‘we’re not going to say what’s on the page, and you don’t really have to either, try to keep up.’

Well, for the My Generation album, there was nothing to be nervous about in them days. We used to take every day as it came. Every day was just a gig and I think we did the recording between gigs literally.

I just want to continue being able to get roles that scare me and make me better and I think I can only grow as an artist if I do things that are scaring me and making me uncomfortable because that’s the only place you’ll learn anything.

[on choosing films she will be in] I have a weird process, but the main thing is like this: I hear her voice in my head. There are a lot of wonderful scripts my agents can’t believe I pass on, but I do because I can’t hear the voice. It doesn’t appeal to me then. I’m really careful. Unless I hear the voice, I can’t do it.

[on sleeping with Trump] I’m very food-motivated. That’s why I stayed and held out for so long because I was told there would be snacks. I was starving! Maybe that’s part of why I was easy prey because I was light-headed.