Robert Webb quotes:

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  • Feminism is an attack on social practices and habits of thought that keep women and men boxed into gender roles that are harmful.

  • 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.

  • I'd kill to be 'Doctor Who.' Maybe they could make the Doctor two people? He has got two hearts, after all.

  • 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.

  • A waiter at the hotel kept telling me that Cape Town is just like a European city, but it's not like that at all. It doesn't feel safe, and I didn't really go out at night.

  • 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 had a friend at college who took being poor very personally. He started showering in the sports centre next door and said he wasn't going to pay for the hot water in our flat any more because he didn't use it. He made me and my other friend pay the bills on our own.

  • Ambiguity around ambiguity is forgivable in an unpublished poet and expected of an arts student on the pull: for a professional comedian demoting himself to the role of 'thinker', with stadiums full of young people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.

  • 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.

  • 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 hate it when people use the word 'sorry' aggressively, as in, 'Sorry, but I hate you.' Sorry's an important word, and it shouldn't be abused.

  • 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.

  • UKIP trades in the language of fear and division; it seeks power in order to reject responsibility.

  • There was a lot of terrible, terrible comedy in the seventies along with 'Fawlty Towers.' It's easy to forget.

  • I was the youngest of three brothers by five years, so I spent most of my childhood playing alone, being Zorro or some other superhero, doing Lego, watching telly and riding my bike.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • My first proper kiss was from Cara Shucksmith when I was 13 or 14 at her birthday party.

  • Mum was an amazing parent and my best pal. The tragedy of it, really, was that she died from breast cancer just as I was becoming a man, aged 17, and we were just starting to speak as adults. She was snatched away, and it felt cruel. She made me laugh.

  • 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.

  • I'm good at finding things to do on my own, even if it's just reading.

  • 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.

  • I snootily say I can't take too many dramatic parts, as it's taking work from actors who aren't funny.

  • I've been called funny. I assume my wife thinks I'm funny. But generally, if you bumped into me and said hello, I would say hello back, politely. And that would be it.

  • We have a family holiday once a year, usually abroad, but that's it. I feel I should have holidays for my family's sake, but I'm not that adventurous.

  • I think of myself as naturally idle. The trouble is, the 'nothing' that I do every day is not really nothing. I potter. I muck about with emails, I make coffee, I fiddle with my computer to make sure that the book I haven't started writing is perfectly synced across all platforms and devices.

  • Religion is many things, but one of them, surely, is a way for adults to indulge in uncritical hero worship.

  • 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.

  • The strength of 'Peep Show' has always been that that it's quite traditional, but it's obviously presented in a very new way.

  • When I was 18, I was halfway up the Eiffel Tower with my friend, Tom, when we decided to stick our heads through the railings. The gap between the railings was exactly the right size to be able to put your head through and nearly get stuck. Which is exactly what happened.

  • I did The Frank Skinner Show, and they gave me a little jukebox-shaped CD player, which looks nice in the kitchen.

  • I was an usher at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith. You had to watch whatever play they had on 40 times.

  • Do I wake up every day and thank God that I live in 21st-century Britain? Of course not. But from time to time, I recognise it as an unfathomable privilege.

  • When I was 15, if Stephen Fry had advised me to trim my eyebrows with a Flymo, I would have given it serious consideration.

  • I don't do much to keep in trim - I try to walk places instead of driving whenever I can, but I really ought to do more.

  • I spend far too much on taxis. Now, if anyone suggests we get the Tube I say, 'The Tube! I'd forgotten about that.'

  • My parents' marriage was already shaky when I came along. They split up when I was five, and I didn't see Dad all that often after that - four or five times a year.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • It should go without saying that there are as many working-class people who hold socially liberal views as there are public-school bigots.

  • 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.

  • 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'm a huge, huge fan of Chris Morris. I think he's a genius, and it is not a word I use very often. I think he's fantastic.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The female characters in 'Peep Show' are not 'strong': they are idiots. As idiotic as the men.

  • My favorite series of 'Peep Show' is always the most recent one, which I can say with all honesty because I don't write it. It gets better and better.

  • I don't do much lying in real life because I don't get away with it.

  • I was in the play 'Fat Pig in the West End,' which is a comedy but has dramatic moments.

  • I cant imagine getting bored with comedy or thinking comedy is beneath us suddenly.

  • I dont do much to keep in trim - I try to walk places instead of driving whenever I can, but I really ought to do more.

  • I get recognised a fair bit. It goes up when Peep Show or the sketch show is on the telly or when were doing loads of interviews.

  • I grew up watching British comedy on TV, really.

  • I've read the Bible, but I felt like a lot of the Bible was oppressive towards women. Then I read the Quran, and I thought it was also oppressive towards women.

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