Top 20 Tom Baker Quotes

Well, I think if more people had more applause, it would make them feel better. I often give my wife a round of applause. If the meal is very good I give her a standing ovation.

One longs to be funny, to make people laugh. Laughter is such a sign of approval, isn’t it?

We are pre-disposed for fantasy, there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting.

I’m obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience. But my feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness.

I used to always be putting my hat on children being photographed and then getting home and discovering I was riddled with lice. That used to happen very, very regularly. I used to get headlice all the time.

I wasn’t interested in novelty. I was looking for good drama.

It’s funny, in literature no one ever goes to the lavatory.

Politicians are just Daily Mail journalists writ large, aren’t they? They’re always telling us what’s going to happen, and we know they don’t know!

Well, I think people don’t recognise my face because I’m so much older now, but it is astonishing that people can recognise a voice. I do sometimes get recognised, and indeed a lot of people do come and see me.

Actors are able to trick themselves into treating anything as if it’s fantastic. It’s a kind of madness really.

I think quite often a fate worse than death is life, for lots of people.

I think people can believe in anything.

I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who, it has been an outrageous failure really – it’s so boring.

I’ve never ever read a script. I really must read Macbeth, because I was in it once. I got a lot of laughs in that, I can tell you.

I have no regrets about being ‘Doctor Who’. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

We have newsreaders behaving like actors, lowering their voices if it’s a sad story, as if we didn’t know it’s a sad story. There isn’t a single cool newsreader.

I don’t watch television. I know better than that.

I really think that reading a whole script is kind of prying and neurotic, don’t you?

Not only don’t I know who I am, but I’m very suspicious of people who do know who they are. I am sometimes ten or twelve people a day, and sometimes four or five people an hour!

The Old Testament is my favourite science fantasy reading.