I sleep all the time! I often leave an event early because I want to have a snooze.

Even though I now eat meat, I have halloumi every day - even at breakfast.

I think the city isn't talked about enough, there are not enough people championing Birmingham. When I was at university in Manchester I wasn't a fan, I was a bit down on my home city. But as I've got older I love living here. It's easy to get around the country to gigs, and it's a calming, friendly city.

I never wanted to be famous, I just wanted to be creative for my job, I suppose, and perform.

My philosophy is, if I couldn't say it in front of my grandmother, I probably shouldn't say it.

It is amazing that I'm making a career out of comedy, my family can't quite believe it.

I don't do vulgarity, I prefer to talk about nice things.

I often ask people in the audience what their favourite cheese is. Anything less than Gruyere and they're just not middle class!

I think it's important some people do publicly go 'Hey, I'm not straight and I'm not gay. I'm somewhere in the middle and that's ok.'

I think it's important to go out and gig all over the country, it makes you a better comic.

As a child, I used to bite my toenails, which is grim. I can still do it.

I love painting. I love writing. I love creating and being around people who are creating.

I used to sing classical music to the flowers in the garden and imagine they were all different parts of the orchestra. It used to really annoy the neighbours.

I do a very good impression of Louis Armstrong.

When you're going into companies and you're secret filming, I didn't realise the amount of protection that you need legally before you can do just the slightest thing.

I think it's something to do with the nurturing side of the psyche; tying up a sunflower or whatever and helping it grow, it is just some kind of core human experience.

I would like to be constantly thinking about life, trying to make it funny.

The idea was to become an actor. Then I found I really didn't like acting.

I just want people to have a laugh.

As a comic, you just want to be liked.

I buy flowers for myself all the time. I'm comedy's Elton John.

I remember weeping silently in bed after watching 'Titanic.'

You can't go too far wrong with the Pointer Sisters.

I quite like the idea that I'm a situation.

My sewing skills are terrible!

I'm good at throwing fabric on myself!

Competitions are great. Unlike a lot of other creative industries they are a great way of climbing the ladder early on. If you win a comp you get on the big clubs' radar. Some people are not great at competitions, so it doesn't work out for everybody, but it is certainly a good way of getting seen by industry people.

A theatre tour as me, Joe Lycett, with support acts. That would be the dream.

I don't have too much of a grand plan.

In England, there are four major cities within a two-hour drive, so the comedy circuit thrives as a result.

I don't think I like sharing the limelight.

The more you know about the world, the more resources you have in terms of things that can inform your character or the circumstances that surround your character.

My father was in the service. His job was to integrate the Armed Forces overseas. So that meant we showed up at military bases in Okinawa or Germany, racially unannounced. That made me, in that particular society if you will, the outsider.

'Black film,' unless it's lucky enough or creative enough, or timely enough to build a life of its own, hangs subjacent to 'white film' on Hollywood's financial score board... aided and abetted by the supposition that so-called black film has no foreign market.

I think it talks about the fact that there are black people in the world who have tremendous amount of talents and have no channel through which they can those talents.

Accolades are there to congratulate you but also to make you understand that it's not over. You now have to continue trying to improve the craft and keep going. It's not something to rest on.

In the 1980s, there was no category to stick me in. 'He sounds too smart' is what I was hearing. I realized that I had to become a member of the school of what I call 'ugly acting.' Which meant I wanted to do what Dustin Hoffman did very successfully: to play character roles, but lead character roles.

One, I had never worked with John Woo before and I wanted to see what that was like, and two, Ben Affleck is a friend, so it would be fun to work with him again.

Proof' is going to be, in many ways, a mystery. It's not a procedural in any way. It's not a medical drama. It really is about trying to investigate whether or not there's life after death.

I suppose I prefer kind of epic dramas like, oh, I don't know... 'Lawrence Of Arabia' or 'Apocalypse Now'; those are the movies that I have a tendency to be most fond of.

If you want someone who is sort of still, has a bit of an edge, is older, you get Morgan Freeman. If you want someone who can carry a gun and still play a father, you get Danny Glover. My category is 'that guy who happens to be black.'

By the time I graduated, I was the drum major, the highest-ranking officer, and third in my class.

I came into the industry at a time when there weren't a lot of choices to what you could do.

I think many villains have the burden of not being very human.

When I started off many years ago, I made a determination that there were certain roles I didn't want to play.

With my background, I came out of the theater.

I actually went to the university as a psychology major, and at orientation, they took us around the campus and took us to the theater for a skit. At the end of the skit, I literally could not get up out of my seat.

For all of the diversity in 'Scandal,' no one else would be sitting in a room wearing a T-shirt and chains and call a Southern white Republican president a 'boy.' And it's those kinds of things that Rowan has the freedom to say that nobody else could say within the confines of the show.

I think theater is the strongest place to find what's missing in entertainment. Unfortunately, it pays the least.

What's lovely about 'Eureka' is that it's a sci-fi show, but it's not monsters from outer space; it's not craziness from outer space. It's just about this community of people and what they do. These geniuses have sometimes done wonderful things and sometimes created global warming. It has this wonderful left-of-center sense of humor.