January

"I like people who are slightly unhygienic. A little grubbiness isn't so bad. BO chic it should be called." - Dame Edna Everage, alias Barry Humphries

"Another beautiful day in Florida. Amazing how much nicer it is to wake up with the sun streaming in. Don't mean to rub it in." - Jonathan Ross, during his suspension from the BBC

"I find racist jokes funnier now than I did 30 years ago because it's so socially unacceptable." - Broadcaster and commentator Rod Liddle

"Like wooden blocks, I'm telling you." - Singer Cheryl Cole, wife of football star Ashley Cole, describes "some" of her fellow Wags, footballers' wives and girlfriends

"Actors should shut up about politics. They tend to be ill-informed finger-pointers who just cosy up to some flavour of-the-month liberal." - Actor Mickey Rourke

"Shakespeare has way too many lines. My ideal theatre piece is about 40 minutes long with no interval." - 007 actor Daniel Craig

"When George Bush finally leaves the White House, the satire industry will briefly join the rest of the economy in recession. It will certainly be the end of an era." - Rory Bremner

"I would like to initiate an initiative - the Broadway Annoying Audience Member Relocation Programme." - Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe, who when appearing in Equus on Broadway, protested about noisy American audiences

"I met Picasso when I was a kid. I turned one of his drawings down which would be worth £37 million now. My dad wouldn't talk to me for a fortnight." - Actor Brian Blessed

"You feel out of touch with your own head." - Actress Kate Winslet, who does not like wearing wigs

"I do condition my hair with honey and beer. I smell like the bottom of a beer barrel for days afterwards, but it is very good for the hair." - Catherine Zeta-Jones

"Do I think men are complicated? People are complicated! I don't know that there is one particular aspect of men in general that I don't understand - other than why do they have nipples? I thought we decided that men are just big, hairy apes." - Actress Scarlett Johansson

February

"Yesterday, I was considered soft porn, but today I am art." - Pamela Anderson of Baywatch fame.

"Just as I love women, I love gay men. I always say it: inside me there is a gay man who wants to come out." - Victoria Beckham

"It was really bizarre. I was learning how to be a black guy from a white guy pretending to be a black man." - Lenny Henry on his preparation for the part of Othello

"OK. This is now mad. I am stuck in a lift on the 26th floor of Centre Point. Hell's teeth. We could be here for hours. Arse, poo and widdle." - Actor Stephen Fry appeals for help on website Twitter while in this predicament

"It's not fashionable but I like to spit out of the window of a moving train." - Writer Paul Theroux

"A good rule to remember for life is that when it comes to plastic surgery and sushi, never be attracted by a bargain." - Graham Norton

"I've been with a lot of women, but who's counting? It's nothing I'm proud of. It's a physical need. Sometimes afterwards I just want to blow my brains out, it's so meaningless." - Actor Mickey Rourke

"I am totally, absolutely romantic. When I broke up with a girl I would listen to the most heart-breaking music and make it worse. That's what girls do. I think I am a girl really." - Comedian Billy Connolly

"Any actor who starts taking `sex symbol' seriously or thinks of themselves as a sex symbol has got some serious problems. I don't mind looking like I need a good wash and a good meal." - Actor Clive Owen

"Not all politicians are bonkers, but most of them are." - William Hague, shadow foreign secretary

"Harrods has no recession. What recession? Not for Harrods this time, sorry." - Mohamed al Fayed, the Harrods boss

"Being with her was like sticking an eggbeater in your brain." - Robert Wagner on Dame Elizabeth Taylor

March

"I am the only woman who has not been beheaded for leaving the Royal Family." - The Duchess of York

"There is a button with 'LC' on it, which I think stands for launch control. I was slightly too frightened to press it in case my underwear burst into flames." - TV's Fiona Bruce on test-driving a new car

"The Kama Sutra revealed to me that 'mutual orgasm' is not an insurance company." - Best-selling writer Kathy Lette

"There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don't ill-treat them." - Best-selling writer Fay Weldon

"Delia Smith's food is lovely. But she is the most boring person in the world." - Top chef Antonio Carluccio

"I don't think it's right for me." - Alan Whicker on death

"It's like cuddling a piece of gristle." - Guy Ritchie's description of hugging his ex-wife, Madonna

"I do a brilliant impression of a bumble bee." - Film-maker Michael Winner

"We got pissed. I imagine it is not unlike your own life." - Broadcaster Chris Tarrant explaining, to a reporter, his arrest after a rowdy domestic fracas

"When people warned me there would be long periods out of work if I became an actor, I couldn't keep a straight face because that was exactly what I had in mind." - Bill Nighy

"Thanks to the tabloid campaigns I have many death threats and I was very pleased to get another one the other day." - Former Labour MP Tony Benn

"I've been to unpretty places with the roles I've played, and I'm attracted to reckless abandon. I like being taken to the edge of my own abyss." - Actor Rhys Ifans

April

"I know I've got Irish blood because I wake up every day with a hangover." - Pop star Noel Gallagher

"She needed a great deal of maintenance." - Actor Robert Wagner on Elizabeth Taylor

"I like colourful knickers, but most importantly a great pair of knickers should be taken off with more joy than they were put on." - Top model Elle Macpherson

"I love it when I get whistled at by builders. If they don't, I'll walk past again until they do." - Hi-De-Hi star Su Pollard, 59

"I'll never retire. The new millennium is the age of adventure as far as I am concerned. I'm going up a volcano and off into space." - Actor Brian Blessed

"My husband says my toes are like Wall's cocktail sausages. He feels peckish whenever he sees them." - Amanda Holden

"Do I suffer for my art? Well, I get a lot of flatulence when I'm nervous." - Actor Martin Clunes

"The sight of one old man kneeling on all fours in front of me assembling a picnic table was enough to put all thoughts of lunch out of my head, possibly for life." - Actor Michael Simkins, on visiting a nudist colony in France

"They're usually very sweet underneath. But they look like some sort of wet dream of Himmler's."- Stephen Fry on fans of emo, goth and metal music

"I've got a lot of back-up because my father was a Catholic, my mother was a Protestant, I was educated by Jews and I'm married to a Muslim. So I won't lose out on a technicality." - Sir Michael Caine, when asked if he thought there was life after death

"It will be great to play a short, fat sweaty loser for a change." - Ricky Gervais on a new film role

"Don't knit while you are wearing a black suit. You look like you've been sheep wrestling." - TV presenter Penny Smith

May

"I would put forward a modest proposition that we were very much better governed by Henry VIII than we are by King Gordon." - TV historian David Starkey takes a swipe at the Prime Minister

"I won't do nudity in films. To act with my clothes on is a performance. To act with my clothes off is a documentary." - Actress Julia Roberts

"Any woman who calls herself a post-feminist should keep her Wonderbra and burn her brains." - Writer Kathy Lette

"I don't do close-ups any more. I am better looking from the waist downwards." - TV presenter Bruce Forsyth

"I don't think there is any place in football for drinking. I have said on several occasions to players: You don't put diesel in a Ferrari." - Harry Redknapp, manager of Tottenham Hotspur

"I don't like getting old. It's a bore. You are just beginning to get the hang of life - and then your body starts letting you down." - Veteran actress Sylvia Syms

"I play a man who is obsessed with his own beauty, so it's perfect casting." - Actor Alex Pettyfer on his new film role

"I can't be the only one to shudder when Sarah Ferguson says she goes on the pull with her daughters." - Writer Libby Purves

"Esther Rantzen, like me, is an egomaniac of the highest order." - TV's Janet Street-Porter

"It is amazing where you can get with a bus pass these days." - Sir Ranulph Fiennes, 65, after conquering Everest

"OK, I don't look like Halle Berry, but one day she sure as hell will look like me." - Actress Whoopi Goldberg

"I really missed those handicapped parking spaces." - Joan Rivers describing her break-up with her one-legged boyfriend

June

"The basic problem is that we are a bunch of barbarians really." - Jeremy Paxman on the British public

"Is Piers Morgan really a prat?" - Reported remark by Prince Harry to Britain's Got Talent judge Amanda Holden

"I have just committed the mortal sin of laughing in the Members' Library. No-one around here has done that for a while." - Tory MP Nadine Dorries

"Man has survived and prospered for more than 150,000 years on this planet without the help of use-by dates." - TV cook Clarissa Dickson Wright who regards them as "just a marketing scam"

"What we need right now is a good political drama, something to stick it to all these lying bloody politicians." - Actor Nigel Havers

"Elizabeth Taylor has more chins than the Chinese telephone directory." - Joan Rivers

"I don't want to give a cool appraisal of Jeremy Irons. I just want to boil him in oil." - Lynn Barber, described as "the rottweiler of journalism", recalls one of her hatchet jobs

"I am sure vegetarians must also account for a lot of gases. Look how many beans they eat." - Celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson attacks Sir Paul McCartney's Meat-Free Mondays campaign

"I have outlived most of my more athletic contemporaries who jogged, golfed and squashed themselves into coronary occlusion." - Barry Humphries, creator of Dame Edna Everage

"I do get very angry at things. My wife has to count to ten because if she gets annoyed at me being annoyed, then I get annoyed at her being annoyed at me being annoyed." - Actor Simon Pegg

"I'm world-famous in West Bromwich." - Entertainer Frank Skinner

"A while ago one girl got mega-drunk and was sick all over my couch. It's a nice couch too, and covering it in vomit just didn't work for me." - TV presenter Steve Jones

July

"I am not a perfect man who has led a faultless life." - Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs

"I did actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper once. I think the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career." - Actor Bill Nighy

"I came into this business uneducated, dyslexic, 5ft 6in, cubic, with a face like a squashed cabbage - and they welcomed me with open arms." - Actor Bob Hoskins

"I do not see how hanging litter louts up by their heels and beating them with sticks could be considered a crime." - TV's Richard Hammond, of Top Gear fame

"I know in my heart that I am Christ and I am here to save humanity." - Former MI5 whistleblower David Shayler

"I don't love my husband as much as my dogs. He knows, he doesn't mind a bit." - Lady Carla Powell, wife of Lord (Charles) Powell, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher

"Peter Stringfellow seems a little confused. He is under the impression that I can secure a papal knighthood for him." - Father Michael Seed, who helped convert Tony Blair to Catholicism, on the night-club supremo

"With the single exception of Park Lane, every north-south route in London slows traffic to the pace of a wounded gnat with pleurisy struggling with a squaddie's backpack." - Shadow education secretary Michael Gove, on driving in the capital

"When I started out as Prime Minister I wanted to please all the people all the time. By the end I was wondering if I pleased any of the people any of the time." - Ex-premier Tony Blair

"My grandmother is a famous atlas." - Actress Joanna Lumley recalls what her small granddaughter told Snow White on a visit to Disneyland in California

"Never marry a man who eats wine glasses as an after-dinner stunt or has a crazy gleam of madness in his eye. This is because it probably is madness, and that's seldom a good long-term bet." - Nicholas Coleridge, of Conde Nast fame, on "what every girl should know"

"Madness is a prerequisite of being in showbusiness." - Actor Rupert Everett

August

"My partner is a Frenchman, so I have got to smell right." - Actress Halle Berry on her choice of perfume

"For most exhausted mums, their idea of 'working out' is a good, energetic lie-down. There is growing medical evidence, you know, that jogging can make you hot and sweaty." - Bestselling writer Kathy Lette

"Men are pigs. I really have every sympathy for women that they actually have to choose one of these arrogant, stupid morons to settle down with and marry." - Film maker Michael Winner

"When I was in bed with Marilyn Monroe, I was never sure before, during or after, where her mind was." - Actor Tony Curtis on the film Some Like It Hot, which the pair made together

"I had to accept my allure seemed to work best among elderly arthritics." - Disc jockey Ken Bruce after "a portly lady in her sixties" had pinched his backside at a railway station

"I don't think I am the cleanest person in the world." - Actress Blythe Duff, star of the TV series Taggart

"Over the moon about strong support for the National Health Service - an institution I will defend to my dying day, second only to Everton FC." - Health Secretary Andy Burnham

"The smartest move I ever made in showbusiness was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as. I was already aged in the wood." - Broadcaster Clive James

"Oh, how heart-tuggingly, liver-clutchingly, gut wrenchingly attractive young people look in this weather." - Stephen Fry

"As ever with modern Britain, we are let down by a vast, over-manned, over-funded, hidebound, obstructive, box-ticking and incompetent bureaucracy." - Writer Frederick Forsyth, on the shortcomings of the National Health Service

"I am 5ft 6in and weigh about 11 stone - about a stone overweight, but that's because of my brain." - Magician Paul Daniels

"I like frogs. I am not crazy about their legs in a buffet, but I like their casual approach to life." - Broadcaster Sandi Toksvig

September

"I feared he would roast cows in my living room." - Comedienne Joan Rivers turning down a request by Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi to rent her Manhattan apartment

"My horses make very silly faces when I'm preparing their meals." - Actor Martin Clunes

"I would like better colouration of my legs, like a little less of that English mottled purple thing that makes it necessary to wear tights all the time." - Supermodel and starlet Lily Cole

"One thing Christians do have in common is that they can't help coming across as smug." - Comedienne Jo Brand

"These days most women have jobs that last way too long. A lot of people in New York barely have time to get laid." - Writer and film-maker Nora Ephron

"I will take questions from the guys, but from the girls I want telephone numbers." - Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at a youth rally in Rome

"I didn't even know I was a feminist until I read it on the back of one of my own books." - Writer Fay Weldon

"All field sports people are doing is turning an inevitable necessity into a pleasure. If the animal is going to be killed anyway, why not take pleasure in it?" - The pro-hunting TV cook Clarissa Dickson Wright

"My big toe alone is the size of Yorkshire." - TV's Andrew Marr, who admits to a very large carbon footprint

"The look of sheer terror as they tottered into the hedge was the best thing I have ever seen in my rear-view mirror." - TV chef James Martin, describing how in his car he deliberately forced cyclists off the road

"I can't imagine going on there and having to eat a kangaroo testicle." - TV's Melinda Messenger explaining why she would not want to appear on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here

"I cannot bear the language TV chefs use - they don't seem able to look at a plate of vegetables without accusing it of sexual activity." - Tory MP Ann Widdecombe

October

"They are constantly trying to produce cattle that will produce more milk and less cow, like a hat rack with an udder attached." - The Duke of Edinburgh on industrialised agriculture methods

"It wouldn't be bad if I could find a man. Do you happen to know any dating agencies?" - The Duchess of York

"I love being in London because it means I am breathing the same air as the Queen." - Actress Melissa George

"Sweat is my sanity. During the campaign, the days never went as well if I couldn't get out there and sweat." - Sarah Palin, the Republicans' former vice-presidential candidate

"I don't like guys my age because they are normally either married or divorced and grumpy, fat and balding." - Madonna

"Unlike furious thin-lipped feminists, I tend not to draw distinctions between men and women, apart from in bed where you really do need to spot the difference." - Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson

"He's like an Irish potato famine miser." - Peaches Geldof, alleging that her father Bob Geldof never gave her pocket money

"Never dissect a corpse when you have got a hangover." - Bond actress Rosamund Pike on her experiences when researching a film

"A large, radioactive bucket of stress." - Writer Salman Rushdie on his ex-girlfriend Pia Glenn

"I've no interest in playing oldies any more. I am far more fitting for the next stage in my career, to play a slut." - Dame Judi Dench

"Aren't those ears great? I just want to grab them. He is like some fabulous little wonderful animal." - Dame Helen Mirren on TV's Andrew Marr

"Professional footballers - those virile young stags of our modern culture - are near perpetual fountains of sputum." - Entertainer Frank Skinner on their spitting habits

November

"The Western world, and the UK in particular, is drowning in a sea of its own blubber." - Actor Michael Simkins on obesity

"Diplomacy rivals prostitution as the oldest profession. Like street-walking, it has never enjoyed a wholly favourable reputation." - Sir Christopher Meyer, former UK ambassador to the United States

"The body image took a real battering. I had really not taken on board how I would feel dressed in a flimsy dress in front of millions of people." - Oxo mum actress Lynda Bellingham, 61, saying the costumes in Strictly Come Dancing were unsuitable for someone of her age

"I don't think that sliding down a wall with a bottle of Sancerre in your hand at 6.30 in the morning is particularly attractive when you're approaching 40 and you've got a kid." - DJ Zoe Ball, who has now given up drinking

"The bank returned one of my cheques today, marked 'insufficient funds'. I am not sure whether they meant mine or theirs." - Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute

"Right now I don't call it the menopause, I call it men-on-pause." - Singer Marie Osmond who says she is too busy for boyfriends

"I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up." - Sophia Loren, 75

"The sex is better and I understand life better. I don't want to be young again." - Actress Jane Fonda on life at 71

"I envy Pete Sampras's dullness. I wish I could emulate his spectacular lack of inspiration." - Tennis legend Andre Agassi on fellow tennis star Pete Sampras

"If a football official were to call for a slow-motion replay every time Didier Drogba fell over, each match would last about six weeks." - Jeremy Clarkson

"It looks like a play castle for a three-year-old." - TV's Chris Addison, star of The Thick of It, on viewing the Houses of Parliament

"Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." - An enigmatic Kate Moss on "stick insect" models

December

"She drinks too much and sleeps with too many people and talks about it too much for common decency, but who of us is perfect?" - Writer Fay Weldon on model Katie Price aka Jordan

"If you think acting is full of queens, you should see the number of queens among academic archaeologists." - Baldrick actor and archaeologist Tony Robinson

"She is the boss. Thank God for that. Whatever it is that women need to sort their men out, she's got lots of it. I'm scared to death of her, totally." - Broadcaster Chris Evans on his wife Natasha

"For what we are about to receive, thanks be to the cook." - What atheist Richard Dawkins said when asked to say grace before a meal

"It wasn't a big thing for me. I've had bigger arguments with my toenails." - Liam Gallagher on the row which brought about his brother Noel's departure from Oasis

"I thought, better to get out while I'm still alive." - Hollywood star George Hamilton explaining why he quit I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!

"I don't think I've ever been asked to act out bad sex. It's not my style. I've been blessed with good rhythm." - Actor Charles Dance

"Elephants don't forget. She doesn't trust me any more." - Actor Rupert Everett on Madonna whom he once described as an "old whiny barmaid"

"A paranoid, bellowing and incompetent leader." - US journal Foreign Policy on how Prime Minister Gordon Brown will be remembered

"My family fight, that's the way it is. We're not common as muck or anything but we do have a little fight now and then." - Singer Joss Stone about an alleged head-butting incident - since denied - at a family christening

"Someone said I wore flat shoes to make John look bigger. I'd never do that. He gets me in high heels or not at all." - Sally Bercow, wife of diminutive Commons Speaker John Bercow

"The last thing a young woman needs is another picture of a sexy pop star writhing in sand, covered in grease, touching herself." - Pop singer Lady GaGa on persuading her bosses to make her album covers less sexy