105 Quotes by David Baddiel

People think making jokes about something is just going to cause trouble. But actually, not making jokes about something is a type - and this sounds very pretentious - of apartheid.

It gives me cancer to have an idea but not do it. Whether I get into trouble for it is not as important as the need to chase the idea.

Baddiel is a slightly quizzical name - it comes from Latvia but people thought it sounded vaguely Hindustani or something. I thought it might be a good idea to write a body swap movie, like 'Trading Places' or 'Freaky Friday,' about somebody who believes they are one thing but suddenly become another.

My parents are very unusual characters, both of them - they're both only children, and they're great, but neither of them are the sort of standard idea of a parent, and not of Jewish parents.

I went to a Jewish primary school and all my parents' friends were Jewish.

My father worked for Unilever, running a mass-spectrometry lab - mass spectrometry is a process for elucidating the chemical structures of molecules, which means that he presided over a legal form of corporate espionage, breaking down the component parts of competitors' products in order to copy them.

I had probably never met a non-Jew until the age of 12.

We were much poorer than many families.

Dad was hyper-furious about money all the time and we didn't mix with high-flying or media families.