Top 60 Harry Enfield Quotes

When I come up with a character, I know how he lives and breathes.

I don’t want my kids talked about. It’s one of the reasons I thought that if I could just make a go of being a writer, that would be good, because I don’t really want my kids growing up with me famous.

Public schoolboys are brought up to assume they should lead society, and Trotskyists know they are right about absolutely everything.

Every day I get something in the post telling me to worry about something else. Worry mail is big business.

Everyone’s come up against a snob or a know-all.

Our sense of humour is complementary. I’m populist; and Paul’s more sophisticated.

I was a nice child.

I used to watch a lot of afternoon TV. I started imitating the movies then.

What better way to attract an audience than to get everyone to shout ‘Outrage!’ at the size of your advance?

When I was 15 my great Aunt Nancy gave me a book of Alan Bennett plays, and I thought he was the bees knees.

The older generation may see us as plucky little Britain, on the Edge of Europe. But more and more of the post-war generation see Britain as a less beautiful, more cramped, more snobbish, less glamorous version of America.

You can be a bit more naughty with a live show.

I was once asked to be a guest presenter on ‘The Big Breakfast’ for a week while Chris Evans was away, but I said no as I knew I’d be hopeless. If they asked me to guest present the ‘Today’ programme on Radio 4, however, I’d jump at the chance.

I tried for about a year to write a teenage character until I finally got the phrase ‘he has lost the power of rational thought and the use of his arms.’ Everything else came from that.

As I get older and skinnier people recognise me much less.

One has to get a slagging once in a while.

Computers are dangerous.

It’s good fun making commercials because you are picked up in a posh car and pampered all day by your personal pamperer, or ‘runner’ as they are known in the business.

As a teenager I was pretty horrible.

My grandmother had a couple of strange books published by the Woolfs. I didn’t know her – she was dead by the time I was born. But I knew my grandfather. He was lovely.

The Slobs were written in a very 2D way, but Kathy Burke brought a touching quality to all her characters.

About once a month, our local church would have an evening Folk Mass, and my mother would drag us along because she saw that the ghastly creatures who sung on these occasions strummed guitars, and she associated all guitar strumming with pop music.

Boys are strange creatures.

One aspect of the male that women find hard to understand is his obsession with electronic gadgets such as mobile phones, tiddly televisions, computers and combined answerphone-fax machines.

Why is everyone so obsessed with attracting the young? The Telegraph, Radio 4 – everyone wants a younger audience when everyone knows the population is getting older and older, and that older people have more dosh than young people.

I’ve never felt cutting-edge. Maybe Loadsamoney was for a few months, but after that I’ve just done family stuff.

Little boys are different from little girls, tend to develop more slowly, and are generally more stupid than their sisters.

I played Nelson Mandela in one thing for laughs – and I did it because this thing had come round from the BBC that we couldn’t do it any more.

I’ve had my own comedy series on telly and I know the truth about politics.

Why would you be a sell-out for making money out of what you can do?

I tend to think that these white supremacists like Terreblanche, the boneheads of the BNP and Bernard Manning are all so revoltingly ugly and unpleasant that they make the best possible advertisement for mixed marriages. Would you prefer your daughter to look like Naomi Campbell or Bernard Manning?

My friend Kate St John is not only a brilliant musician and beautiful person, but also an excellent White Goods Adviser.

When looking for an Oscar-winning performance Americans demand not mental instability but mental disability, ie Tom Hanks playing a simpleton or Dustin Hoffman as an autistic man. The Yanks are suckers for such patronising tosh.

Someone said that the good thing about my TV programme was that it had so many tics, which I think are the subtle little touches of originality that Paul brings to it.

If religion bends to society’s whims, like Peter Tatchell himself, it ceases to be religious, so what’s the point?

I have dealings with a pension firm, an insurance company and a bank, and every day one of these institutions tries to worry me into buying something else. The bank wants to sell me a pension, the pension company wants to sell me insurance for my pension and the insurance company wants to insure my bank account.

Men seem to relate to boys better, sharing their interests in whizzing about and football and car-cars and other moronic activities.

All my big success has happened since I worked with Paul. I’ve worked with other people and alone, but I’ve enjoyed myself more and worked best with him. If he became big-headed that would be fatal, because I’m the bighead in our relationship, and I bully him over work.

People are much more vicious about comedy than about anything else. If it’s drama they go: ‘Oh well, that didn’t really work.’ But comedy, they get angry. And people who never thought you were ever very funny go: ‘Fantastic, we can really have a go now. Great!

Like all extremely nice people, I tend to be on the side of the underdog, or at least feel sorry for him.

If people like you, and you disappoint them, they get very hurt by it.

The most confident people in Britain are those who went to top public schools and Trotskyists.

I’ve been deeply involved in writing garbage since I was 16.

When I saw ‘The Office’ I thought, ‘That’s it for our type of humour. This has changed comedy for ever.’ I loved it.

I can’t write a sitcom.

Like most lapsed Catholics, I will probably return to the fold when I start to fear death.

I don’t believe in Tony Blair.

The history of post-war Britain shows us that we are lousy at running our economy. We need someone to do it for us.

I’d like to play a larger-than-life character done straight, like Clouseau. To move away from Dick Emery and towards Peter Sellers.

If the continual cutting back of public services has led to low public morale then simply pass a few feel-good Acts to force people to be happy.

I have a dear friend called Kate St John who is a musical genius.

I’m trying to stop reading the Daily Telegraph. I’ve read it for several years because I prefer to read a pro-Government newspaper that slags the Government off, which the Telegraph frequently does, than an anti-government one or a trying-oh-so-hard-to-be-neutral one.

In the 1970s the government propped up managers who couldn’t run their industries properly. Nowadays they prop up our lousy managers who can’t run our services properly.

It’s about time we stopped being so insecure and defensive and admitted that the Germans are better at economics than us. We like laughing and they like maths.

Ricky Gervais captured the staggering laziness that comes with a boring job.

I hated everything but punk for a long time.

Little Britain’ happened and it was so deliciously uncool.

America exports its culture world-wide but with us they don’t have to surmount a language barrier, and therefore they swamp us. While other European cultures are protected from erosion by their languages, ours is not.

What Paul and I do is not fashionable – it’s a load of silly characters mucking about.

Sometimes I have really good ideas, but it is always Paul’s language that makes them work. Without him I’d be more clinical, more mundane. What I achieve with him is different to any thing I could ever hope to achieve with any one else.