“When Harold Pinter was lobbying to have London's Comedy Theatre renamed the Pinter Theatre, Stoppard wrote back: "Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?"”

“It was a family name on my mother's side, and I thought my own name Pratt, if I ever got known in the theatre might be unfortunate.”

“People either have comedy or they don't. You can't teach it to them.”

“Comedy is a weird but very beautiful thing. Even though it seems foolish and silly and crazy, comedy has the most to say about the human condition. Because if you can laugh, you can get by. You can survive when things are bad when you have a sense of humor.”

“Comedy doesn't really have any meaning without sadness … The most meaningful comedy comes from some really serious pathos.”

“I was on a cycle rally and we were passing Chequers – I thought, I'll nip in. I'm sorry – I told him. I was very forthright, stupid to be anything else. I said, "Harold, be careful", I said, "Harold, don't rush into this, I beg you." I don't think he got the message. Well, it's very difficult when you're shouting through a letter box!”

“The trope was eminently Oakeshottian. Politics was not a battle of interests, or a quest for truth, or a voyage of progress – it was an aesthetic performance, to captivate an audience. But it was not high theatre (Oakeshott had also insisted that politics was a second-rate activity). It was more like commercial theatre, the drama of the boulevards that plays to our emotions or embarrassments – Rattigan rather than Racine, he explained. On this stage, Mount has certainly given us a stylish production. We might call it the comedy of reform.”

“I would rather have stayed in the theater and done comedy. Comedy in film (was) so narrow for women. I was much happier doing very black comedy onstage, and I could never find anything of that ilk on film. The closest to what I might have accomplished was `Working Girl.'”

“My favorite comedy is comedy where nothing is achieved and there is no point.”

“Great comedy is great comedy only if it has an element of truth in it.”