If it's free put me down for two please

Bob Marley - yeah, I've always loved his stuff.

I've always tried to retain that childlike wonder.

When I draw my caricature self-portrait, I always do a huge smile.

I draw the line at filth and crude language. It seems to be an excuse for not being funny.

George Martin recorded a lot of my stuff before the Beatles, so I observed their meteoric rise.

If you turn a smiling face on the world, you've got a chance of finishing up a good-looking old person.

I regard myself as being enormously lucky to have been accepted by the British public in so many areas.

I always felt I had to fill silences, usually by singing or whistling. It was nerves and shyness, really.

It's essential that you make eye contact with your audience. You've got to know what's happening out there.

Prison is no hardship, really. I'm in the art room as an assistant to the tutor, and basically, I'm doing what I like.

My approach to painting doesn't involve any heavy thinking about how am I going to present this, what am I going to do.

Try and spread a lot of love and affection around the world. The most important thing is not to 'con' the public. Be real.

I had always been told by my parents, not implicitly told, but every inference was that Britain was the hub of the universe.

I was always different from all the other kids, and I was doing things that nobody else did or seemed to have any interest in.

If I could go back in time, I'd return to when my parents were alive and appreciate them more than I did when I was growing up.

It's important to seize the moment. If there's something you want to say, don't put it off, because you might miss your chance.

When I was presenting 'Animal Hospital,' the grey started to creep into my beard and moustache. I used my wife's mascara to darken it.

People say 'Are you going to retire?' To me, that sort of equates with lying down and dying. When you're doing something you love to do, why would you stop?

The Avalanches was a great dance track, I thought, but I always feel a little bit let down when there are just two lines repeated constantly. Over and over. Forever.

As I walked up the imposing steps of the Royal Academy, I came fact to face with Alwen Hughes. She looked just as stunning as she had done in my first year at art school.

I will never shave off my beard and moustache. I did once, for charity, but my wife said, 'Good grief, how awful, you look like an American car with all the chrome removed.'

I hope that maybe I am on this planet to try and spread a bit of love and affection and to try and help people to warm toward their fellow man instead of all this destruction and misery.

When you have been in TV and performing for as long as I have, you realise that you probably entertain in your sleep too... as for my catch phrase, I didn't actually say so much 'Can you see what it is yet?

I remember very vividly what it's like to be a child. The adults you liked were the ones who listened to you when you spoke and gave you time to say what you wanted to say and actually listened, and quite often reacted as a result of what you'd said.

I was being singled out as the best in the class at this, that and the other, nearly always to do with art. And then I was a very good swimmer from a very early age, and once again the best in the class, and when I was about five or six, I was the best in the school.

For sheer creativity and totality of involvement, 'Rolf's Cartoon Club' with HTV in Bristol was an amazing show to work on, but I think the 'Rolf on Art' series, culminating in the painting of the Queen's portrait to celebrate her 80th birthday, just nudges into the favourite spot.

I was hoping to do an impressionist painting, but I wanted a good likeness and I wanted to create a feeling of the lady as a person, as a human being rather than as a figurehead for the monarchy and a pomp-and-circumstance sort of formal portrait. I wanted more of a relaxed portrait.

People can see you on TV sloshing paint around with big four-inch brushes, and I learned to talk to camera in a friendly voice, not talking down to people, just explaining what I was doing. People like Picasso, Van Gogh, and Rembrandt did not have a weekly TV programme where people could see them painting.

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