Quotes & Jokes by Eddie Izzard / page 11

I can go from blokey to girlie in 15 minutes and then I'm out the door. But that's the fastest I can do it. Becoming a woman takes work.

I'd be happy to be taken as a woman - and that's what I was initially trying to do when I started throwing on dresses and stuff. But that wasn't going to happen because everyone kept calling me sir. So I thought I'd change the method and just start wearing what I wanted to wear.

MAC gave me 55 lipsticks to test. These are the same lipsticks I got caught stealing by the police when I was 15. How ironic.

As long as they're homophobic behind closed doors, and don't hurt anyone, I'm fine with it.

If you get anything creative going, then the work and play thing is the same thing, I feel.

There's something weird, something phenomenally dreary about Christian singing. The Gospel singers are the only singers that just go crazy, joyous and it's fucking amazing! And it's born out of kidnapping, imprisonment, slavery, murder, all of that - and this joyous singing!

I just believe in the goodwill of people, the power of people to do something positive.

Most transvestites fancy girls.

Before birds get sucked into jet engines, do they ever think, "Is that Rod Stewart in first class?"

And then earlier than that there were the crusades. The crusades were totally fucked. Richard the Lionheart, who had the heart of a lion as well as his own. He ripped it out of the lion, and the lion was left with a bicycle pump and not much to do.

When I first came out, I thought, I want to walk like a real woman, I don't want to do mincing steps. And there was some girl I saw walking up Holloway Road in Islington who had this long languid walk and I thought, that's what I like, so I incorporated her walk into mine.

But in the Olympics, in the last Olympics, we, Britain, didn't do very well, got no gold medals at all, which pissed me off. But we're setting up a British Olympics, where each and every event is a British event, like the British hundred metres: "Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, pardon me, excuse me… I think I was here first!" We should win that.

I am two lesbians in a man's body.

We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail around the world and stick a flag in. "I claim India for Britain!" They're going "You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!" "Do you have a flag …? "No..." "Well, if you don't have a flag, then you can't have a country. Those are the rules... that I just made up!"

In stand-up it really helps to play yourself and talk about your own feelings. You cannot fail to be original if you're just talking about what you think about X, Y and Z. Unless you've got a twin brother who's also a stand-up.