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.

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?

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

That is not a functional use of language. That is a drunk driver crashing a pickup truck full of alphabet soup.

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.

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.

Democracy is like a tambourine – not everyone can be trusted with it.’

There’s no substitute to being successful on an actual chart.

I don’t know if it was much of an interview. We just shot the breeze.

At some point, I would like to write a book and other things, but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind, but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck.

I started doing comedy because that was the only stage that I could find. It was the pure idea of being on stage. That was the only thing that interested me, along with learning the craft and working, and just being in productions with people.

Everyone has an idea that they think would be a great movie. Everyone has a cousin who they think you should work with. Everyone has a warped vision of Hollywood and what success in Hollywood is like. That you love cocaine and that you spend every night in orgies with models. If only it were true.

Even people that know Johnny Cash’s music really well and know that he was married don’t really know that much about June Carter. So finding out about her really helped to inform my performance and to bring her to the front in a way that she has never been before.

I wanted to be in a band that shared ideas and were in it together.

Some of the best times in my life happened under the influence of drugs… I’d still be doing it if I could make good judgement calls. I’d still be doing it if I didn’t blow up to the size of an aircraft hangar, because it was a great time.

Lipgloss is my calling!

So, Alec Baldwin; great actor or greatest actor? I’m gonna say “greatest actor”; Greatest…living…American…actor…in…the Baldwin family…by a mile.

I have absolutely no empathy for camels. I didn’t care for being abused in the Middle East by those horrible, horrible, horrible creatures. They don’t like people. It’s not at all like the relationship between horses and humans.

[on British Red Cross album to assist and create awareness of Refugee Crisis] The position we are in, it’s paramount we all do our best one way or another to help.

I think it’s really finding that belief in yourself, where you just have it no matter what’s going on, no matter what anyone else says. I think that’s the challenge, is to really have that belief in yourself.

There’s not a lot of towns that I can go to and take family – too many incongruous knocks on doors – “Hello, honey. Have you missed me?”