Stewart Lee Quotes

New Jersey shaped who and what I am. Growing up in Jersey gave you all the advantages of New York, but you were in its shadow. Anyone who's come from here will tell you that same story.

Something I notice speaking to writers from south of Hadrian's Wall is that the culture is different. At base, I think Scotland values its creative industries differently from England.

If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.

I'm not posh at all. I grew up in Sheffield but never managed to pick up the accent - which was careless because there'd be some cache now in being a northern playwright, but I missed out on that one.

I write in coffee shops, libraries, parks, museums. I get antsy and then get on my bike and go someplace else, letting the ideas spin around in my head as I dodge taxis.

I am a comic writer, which means I get to slay the dragons, and shoot the bull.

Creating fantasy is a very personal thing, but you can't take the process too personally.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

At 'SNL,' I wrote political stuff, but I never felt the show should have an axe to grind. But when I left in '95, I could let my own beliefs out.

I was brought up by the English side of my family, who are very repressed and working class. Absolutely lovely, but very English.

I am fairly classless because it is very difficult to class someone who comes from a mixed marriage.

Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.

I'm a working-class kid from a blue-collar New England family.

I still consider myself a working-class girl and would send my kids to public school.

When I'm doing a store in a country, I always like to consider the concept of the country and the city.

If I knew anything about what people wanted and was popular, I'd still be writing for 'Saturday Night Live'. I can only write what I want, and hopefully people will like it.

Comedians kind of write what comes to them. You can give yourself little assignments, but it's what inspires you.

When you're a writer, you never know which of your pieces are going to gain a toehold and which will not, and it's best not to care too much.

I grew up half in South Central and half in the San Fernando valley.

Well, let's put in this way, I grew up in West New York, New Jersey.

I've never felt a need to really respond to someone else's writing.

One identity is as a television writer, which is very classically Southern California, but another of my personae is as a New Yorker cartoonist.

We're called New Jersey but we're actually the suburbs of New York.

Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana.

'Cheers' was a good first step because I got to write my own material.