Jo Brand Quotes

I thought I was funny as a kid.

Over the years I attempted to make my style a bit more relaxed 'cause the initial style you couldn't watch for more than ten minutes without wanting to kill me.

I'm just trying to spread the word and upturn the myth that actually you should be resting after cancer treatment. You shouldn't; you should be getting out and doing any kind of exercise you can. You don't have to run a marathon, but you just have to up your activity levels.

I used to do bell ringing in Benenden church. It was really good fun, actually. My best friend's dad was the local vicar, and so it was expected as her best friend that I would go to church every Sunday with her.

It's actually very hard when you're settled in one place to completely uproot yourself and go.

Regular panelists on shows can be terrifying. They own that space, and many guest comics suspect they are favoured in the edit, while their own hilarious jokes end up being ejected into the ether.

Television provokes strong opinions, and sometimes we try a bit too hard to appeal to everyone.

I think my comedy, the put-downs I do to hecklers, are the accumulated bitterness of years of people feeling that it's perfectly acceptable to make a comment on your appearance when they don't even know you.

There are 10-20 times more male comics than female comics; it's something to do with the social structure of society.

People are so different in reality from the picture created of them on TV. So it's all a creation; everything is made up.

Even nice things don't make you happy when you're tired.

My mum is bright, ambitious, well read, political and very bolshie: when my dad was conscripted into the Army and posted to Libya, she convinced some general to let her go with him. I don't know how she managed it.

I think some people ramp a side of themselves up for performance purposes.

When I was a nurse my favourite assignment was the anorexic ward. I sometimes ate as many as seventeen dinners

The comedian sticks as religiously to her theme as a dancer sticks to a diet.

I don't hold any candle for drama versus comedy.

People say you should read your criticism because it will make you a better person but it doesn't. It just makes you a sad bitter old showbiz nightmare.

I have two brothers and we basically spent our lives playing in the woods, falling in ponds, getting chased by wasps and riding donkeys that we shouldn't have been riding.

My dad's a very sensitive man, but as the archetypal rebellious teenager, I didn't realise that.

My ex-boyfriend can round last night, which was weird because I didn't know he was in a coma.

Christians have always been fodder for comedians who have tended to portray them as anoraks - slightly clammy, beatifically smiley dullards with barely a personality between them.

Inside every fat person there's a thin person looking to get out - They've just eaten them

Punk allowed women to stop looking feminine. Oh, the relief.

My father was an engineer and my mother was a social worker, and they met as young socialists. That probably tells you everything you need to know about my attitude to money - I've never really been bothered about it.

I believe that if your brain has to get to grips with complicated words, then you won't get Alzheimer's. I'm sure it's not true, but I do believe it.

I think it's difficult, if you're a quite private person like I am, to write about your life very intimately.

I like reading, I like boring things, and yet I think people for ages had this image of me that I was on the tube with a chainsaw looking for any likely candidate.

Does anyone really go into nursing intending to be apathetic, cold and removed from suffering? I find that very difficult to believe.

I tend to think the world is a bit of a miserable place, so anyone who can add to people's optimistic, cheerful side is doing a good job, which is what I hope I'm doing.

I love everything about books. I love the content, the way they look and even the lovely way they smell. I think a book collection says something about you as a person, and certainly my books are something I'd want to pass on for future generations.

I made a supreme effort not to do that thing that parents do, which is to bore people without children to death by going on and on about how funny their children are, so there's none of that hopefully.

My mum always felt that women deserved as much as men, and should have as much power, so I suppose I opted to go into a very male-dominated arena to try and prove that.

With proper acting, I don't know what I would play - I got sent a script for a play, and it said in the notes that my proposed character was 'hideously fat and ugly'. That made my day. I mean, I do know I am no oil painting.

I have big friends who won't go swimming because they're too embarrassed about it. I feel that's such a shame, because actually people should be encouraging fat people who are exercising to do it, not pointing and laughing.

Being Christian towards poor people means trying to improve their lives and give them back some self-respect.

Once you get labelled, people expect you to behave within the very narrow confines of that label.

No one I know is actually so rude as to tell me I've become duller since having children. But I'm sure they think it.

I've been breastfeeding for two years. I could light the gas ring with my nipples.

I'm a Luddite with computers, and I'm slightly worried about being hacked as well.

The funny thing is, I don't actually think of myself as fat at all. I don't think I am. Not really.

One thing Christians do have in common is that they can't help coming across as smug.

Again, with two small children it's incredibly hard to commit yourself to anything because you're just getting interested in it and someone comes along and goes I want Thomas The Tank Engine on, and screams the place down until you put it on.

Managers of hospitals over the years have been increasingly recruited from outside the health service, and although their experience of running a supermarket chain might allow them to balance the books, it does not mean they have any insight into how a ward should be managed and patients best served.

It wasn't a conscious effort to have kids later. It was just the way life goes.

I'm a real Kentish maid, you know.

A good culture in a hospital can absorb and manage a few bad nurses, but once the culture becomes bad in itself, bad nursing practice is much harder to hide.

There's a general sense that women are more relaxed and less defensive in comedy than they used to be. I think it's easier than it was but underlying it all there is still a pretty sexist view of women on stage, which to me hasn't changed that much.

I swam at school a lot. Long-distance swimming in pools, and diving, then when we moved to Hastings when I was 13 I used to swim in the sea all the time; I loved it out of season and when it was rough.

I can honestly say I've never sold any arms to a repressive foreign regime while reassuring everyone at home that the weapons will be used for nice things.

I don't like doing stand-up, because I don't like standing up.

I remember when Victoria Wood started to come through, and I thought she was great, though she and I are very different in our approach.

I'm not a flag waver for obesity. It's not healthy, and you have a crap life because there is such a downer on it.

I love doing stand-up. It's so self-contained - you go there, you do it, you go home - but with telly, there are too many people involved with it with opinions. You have a product, and everyone wants to change it.

When you have children, your house smells very unpleasant all the time.

I never think, 'Where am I going to be in a year's time?' That seems to be a sure way of missing the fact that you might be quite happy now.

It's very difficult to learn not to take nasty heckles personally.

My preference is swimming in the sea. I find the sea is more liberating, wild and good fun rather than plodding up and down a pool.

If you want to get a pet for your child, I suggest a chicken so that when they get bored of it after a couple of days at least you can have a nice roast dinner.

Suffice to say, many women find their first appearance on a comedy panel show to be their last. Second chances seem to be given less often to the female of the species.

I'd love to live in Kent but it's all a question of work.

I still get blokes who say, 'Oh you hate men, don't you?' And I say, 'No, I just hate you.' I really love doing that, just to see the look on their faces.

So, my style has hopefully changed over the years and it is more relaxed, and I do tend to smile and have more than one expression these days hopefully - which I didn't at the beginning.

When I was a nurse I never had much money, and I was still happy then.

I've never trained as an actor. I've always thought I'm not a good actor. I've been told I'm not a good actor by a lot of people.

To me, a politician's job is to listen to constituents' problems and try to sort them out.

Occasionally, some sitcoms still stereotype women - the old dragon or the dolly bird - but on the whole we've moved away from that.

An overweight guy went to the doctor who advised him to try a keep fit DVD. But the guy said he couldn't be bothered. "Well" suggested the doctor, "try something that leaves you a little short of breath." So the buy took up smoking.

My mum and my husband are from Irish backgrounds, so we have a lot of potatoes. Chips, mashed, boiled, new potatoes, I love them all. Even the slightly wonky ones like Duchess potatoes that go up in a little spiral.

School was great. There were no boys there, which didn't really bother me at the time because I had two brothers, so I was quite pleased not to spend any more time with boys.

I'm too nervous to eat before I go onstage, and I'll usually eat out after the performance or when I get home at midnight.

Who do I like? I am a big fan of French and Saunders - not that that they are particularly stand-up I have to say, but I think they have been great for women and they are of themselves just incredibly funny whether they are male or female.

I suspect most politicians feel overwhelmed because people's lives are a real struggle, full of unhappiness, and you would probably feel powerless to do anything about it.

I am a hip-hop artist, as you probably know. My hip-hop name is Big Smalls.

Having children is fab. They keep me young and make me get up in the morning.

I look like Julian Clary on steroids.

I've never, ever had people being aggressive to me in public or abusing me, and actually quite a lot of men do say to me, 'You're quite good' - though they can't bear to go, 'You're great.'

I have friends who vote Tory, and I'm appalled, but that's not to say they're not great people in so many other ways.

I find it difficult to judge myself, but people say that I have become a bit more socially acceptable over the years in terms of my material; which apparently at the beginning - though I never really intended it to be - was man hating and now is just a bit more cuddly.

It is unrealistic to expect an entire profession to be completely good. There are bound to be some individuals who are stressed, who are unkind, who are a bit rubbish at their job, who are in the wrong career.

I never ever take into consideration the consequences of my actions until it's too late.

It's inevitable that if you do okay on something like that you don't just annoy people, that it will make a difference because it seemed like such a lot of people so, yes I would have to say that it has done.

Birthdays are nature's way of telling you to eat more cake.

Not many women will go out on a limb to make themselves really unattractive and unfeminine so you can get the laughs, but it's a great thing to do in my book.

There are comics who treat women fairly appallingly. But I can be great friends with them because I don't tend to do that ticking of boxes: it can make life too simplistic.

It's a video release as well so I have to be perfectly honest and go, probably not specifically for DVD, but there are extra bits on it that aren't on anything else, so as exciting as that sounds.

Whatever situation you are in, that is what is normal for you.

How do you conduct an intimate relationship where no one ever loses it? Where no one ever lashes out, where no one ever smacks anyone in the mouth?

I've always been criticised for how filthy my material is. Victoria Wood said to me once, 'I wish I was a bit ruder, like you,' and I said, 'Well, I wish I was a bit cleaner, like you.'

With two small children, I haven't had a wash since 2001 so the chance to go shopping is way down the list. It is something I do intend to get.

Jeremy Clarkson is rather charming, but I can't stomach his public persona. I don't like his casual racism and casual misogyny.

My personal opinion is that you can't be racist towards white people. You can be prejudiced about them, but being prejudiced isn't an illegal act, whereas being racist can be.

Everything becomes magnified at night. Sounds travel in a different way, it's dark, and everything seems far more spooky.

I have such admiration for single mothers. I simply don't comprehend how you'd cope with that intensity, the lack of breaks, ever, on your own.

I used to get a lot of people saying 'Oh, you are such a lucky granny.' But the fact of the matter is you can be a grandma at 35 these days.

I took my husband to the hospital yesterday to have 17 stitches out - that'll teach him to buy me a sewing kit for my birthday.

I went on the pill when I was 16, put on four stone ... so that proved to be a very effective contraceptive.

Each generation has a backlash against the generation before.

I think self-esteem is fluid. It's not a fixed state, and so some days are better than others.

Wild men are so enormously attractive.

Some men are deeply likable but have attitudes I don't like. Does that mean I should completely dismiss them? It's like saying: if someone votes Tory can you like them? And, yes, I can. I have friends who vote Tory, and I'm appalled, but that's not to say they're not great people in so many other ways. We have a tendency to oversimplify things.