Robert Webb
My first proper kiss was from Cara Shucksmith when I was 13 or 14 at her birthday party.Collection: Birthday
Parenting girls makes you quite gender-conscious - it's almost impossible to fight the power of pink. It's not such a terrible thing to want to be a princess when you're five, but it would be nice if there were some other options.Collection: Parenting
I proposed to my wife on Brighton Beach, and she said yes. That's pretty romantic. Even though I forgot to go down on one knee because I was too busy trying to compose the question.Collection: Romantic
My mother died when I was 17, and I moved in with my dad to make a 12-month pig's ear of retaking my A-levels.Collection: Dad
Feminism isn't about hating men. It's about challenging the absurd gender distinctions that boys and girls learn from childhood and carry into their adult lives.
I suppose if I went to Turkey - I mean, I can't imagine going that far away, but if I did go to Turkey, yes, I would probably try to know 'please' and 'sorry' and 'thank you', and 'a beer please', and all the useful words.
Religion is many things, but one of them, surely, is a way for adults to indulge in uncritical hero worship.
I'm troubled by how much I like Rowan Williams. I think it reveals character flaws in myself that I'd rather not think about. The softly spoken soon-to-be-former Archbishop of Canterbury is my secret crush, my weird pash, and my guilty pleasure.
I'm feeling around for what happens in a post-'Peep Show' world.
I've been sort of coasting on 'Peep Show.' So now it's kind of, 'When I grow up, I'm going to have to be an actor if I'm not careful.'
He likes 'Confetti,' and he doesn't like 'Star Wars.' I think that just relieves us from the burden of ever having to take Mark Kermode seriously again.
I can't imagine getting bored with comedy or thinking comedy is beneath us suddenly.
It's odd because some actors are very scared of comedians.
I don't do much lying in real life because I don't get away with it.
If I hadn't got into comedy, I wouldn't have met Abbey, my wife, and I wouldn't have my two girls, and the whole thing unravels. That's the thing about being basically - whisper it quietly - happy, is that you don't really want to change anything, because once you start changing stuff, then what you've got all disappears.
I grew up in Lincolnshire, trying to get the daughters of farmers and policemen to like me. It didn't go well until I got to college where, suddenly, there were different sorts of humans.
The only thing I've cooked while entertaining is stir-fry.
Car-essential is a real turn-off to me, so yeah, I just want a friendly holiday resort with a villa and a pool, but which is really private, but there again, there's a supermarket and a doctor's and a beach a five-minute walk away. That's all I want, and it's quite difficult to find.
I think jokes can actually go to places that drama can't.
We call ourselves comedy writer-performers, and that encompasses everything, and I certainly have a very open mind about it.
We got our revolution out of the way long before the French and the Americans. The monarchy was restored, but the sovereignty of our parliament, made up of and elected by a slowly widening constituency of the people, has never been seriously challenged since then.
Ambiguity around ambiguity is forgivable in an unpublished poet and expected of an arts student on the pull: for a professional comedian demoting himself to the role of 'thinker', with stadiums full of young people hanging on his every word, it won't really do.
I grew up watching British comedy on TV, really.
I don't really have that much contact with Americans. I mean, I see the oddest things on the Internet, I suppose. And I've got a couple of American friends, but they are Anglophiles anyway because they've decided to come live here.
Basically I try not to knock other comedians.
There was a lot of terrible, terrible comedy in the seventies along with 'Fawlty Towers.' It's easy to forget.
To do comedy, you have to be a pretty good actor to start with.
I snootily say I can't take too many dramatic parts, as it's taking work from actors who aren't funny.
When I present those clip shows and movie mistakes and things, the persona the writers adopt for me is unimpressed, superior, very sarcastic - I'm not any of that. I can do it, but that's not what I'm like.
I was in the play 'Fat Pig in the West End,' which is a comedy but has dramatic moments.
When the Mac ad campaign was in full swing, I quickened my pace as I went past certain bus stops. My wife told me that she loyally took a piece of chewing gum off my nose once.
If I told my 18-year-old self that one day I'd have a sitcom and a sketch show on TV, I think he'd just drum his fingers and go, 'When? How long is that going to take?'
I'd kill to be 'Doctor Who.' Maybe they could make the Doctor two people? He has got two hearts, after all.
Feminism is an attack on social practices and habits of thought that keep women and men boxed into gender roles that are harmful.
It should go without saying that there are as many working-class people who hold socially liberal views as there are public-school bigots.
The female characters in 'Peep Show' are not 'strong': they are idiots. As idiotic as the men.
I don't care where you went to school. There - have I made your day? No? All right, I'll go further: I also don't care what your dad did for a living or how your mum voted. Nor do I mind whether you ate your tea in front of the telly, dinner at the kitchen table, or supper in the dining room.
We think; therefore, we often talk rubbish.
Very bad things follow when we kid ourselves that we're naturally rational, rather than the more humbling truth: naturally emotional.
Where you have 20 people who all share roughly the same educational and life experiences, they're going to come up with the same solutions to the same problems.
My childhood was as heavily gendered as any you would find in a working-class household in Lincolnshire.
Slow, skinny, and an utter countryside coward: I lived in dread of nettles, spiders, and the very sound of a wasp. As a victim, I was beneath the dignity of the bullies in my year but fair game to the ones in the year below.
We are people, individuals comprising a variety of sexes, races, shifting sexualities and all the rest of it. Every convention that tries to reinforce this difference is a step back. Notions of gender pointlessly separate men from women, but also mothers from daughters and fathers from sons.
I am a feminist. I don't especially care for the term, but there it is.
No, feminism isn't 'over.' We need it not only to challenge injustice but because the whole gender expectations thing is bad for men, too.
Missing out an apostrophe or two does not make you an idiot. But equating party allegiance with nationhood certainly makes you a thug. And thugs don't often notice that they're thugs, usually because they're also idiots.
UKIP trades in the language of fear and division; it seeks power in order to reject responsibility.
Ukippers are the kinds of fools who haven't noticed they're sleep-walking towards fascism. Many UKIP candidates are of the age when their parents fought in the Second World War.
The way people imagine their political leaders is, like it or not, an important factor in how they decide to vote and, indeed, whether they vote at all.
On 'EastEnders,' if someone gets surprising news on the phone, the scene ends with them looking at their handset in amazement. No one in real life does that.