John Cleese was a big hero of mine. He grew up in Weston Super Mare near Bristol where I grew up; he was always very tall and gangly, but he was smart and used his physicality in a very funny way. I used to think, 'Well he came from Weston and he did it, so there's a chance for me.'

Stephen Merchant

I really love New York, but I have to say, the humidity during the summer is a nightmare for a cartoonist. Not only am I sweating in my studio, my bristol board is curling up, the drafting tape is peeling off the board, my Rapidograph pens bleed the minute I put them to paper... it's a disaster.

Adrian Tomine

You know you've become a brat when you have a room you like at the Bristol in Paris.

Alexa Chung

At Bristol I found it quite difficult to continue trying to balance three things - teaching, research and public engagement, for which television was obviously the most prominent part.

Alice Roberts

I was effectively unemployed after my son was born. I resigned from Bristol because I wasn't happy with the way my career was going then discovered I was pregnant when I was out of a job, but I was freelancing.

Alice Roberts

I studied politics and economics at Bristol, and people always assumed that I'd go into politics or a non-government organisation when I left. I might well do this later on. I'd love to represent a West Country seat in the House of Commons.

Ben Elliot

Let's get one thing straight: there's no such thing as the Bristol sound.

Beth Gibbons

I grew up in a little town between Bath and Bristol with my parents and grandparents in the same house. It was rural and idyllic.

Bill Bailey

I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertaker's assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

Brian Blessed

The photoshoot glitz and TV studio make-up isn't the real me. I spend most days at home in Bristol in jeans and a T-shirt running around after the kids or shopping in the Co-op.

Carol Vorderman

I saw a band called The Electric Guitars, from Bristol. I described them to Roland, and he just started playing a riff on guitar and said, 'Do they sound like this?' And they did.

Curt Smith

The standard Bristol set at being a mother is high for a woman to have to step into. She, as a mom, is crushing it.

Dakota Meyer

I will tell you, I don't miss me and Bristol fighting, but coming home to an empty house every other week, you walk in there, and it's a reminder of the failure of the marriage.

Dakota Meyer

For me, the dilemma is I love Bristol, but you can only do that for so long and not get it back. It's been something that's been hard for me to accept. It breaks my heart.

Dakota Meyer

When someone tells me they've never been to a race, I tell them that the first one they should go to is Bristol, Tennesee. The shape of the track, the energy, and excitement under the lights is similar to what you might get at a stick-and-ball game in college football or the NFL.

Dale Earnhardt Jr.

I never thought I would ever win a Daytona 500. I never thought we would sweep Bristol. I just never thought any of that stuff was going to happen or be possible.

Dale Earnhardt Jr.

This might sound really foolish, but when I came to Edinburgh in 1988 I had spent nearly all my life living south of Bristol, and I was just amazed that a city like Edinburgh was actually in the British isles.

David Nicholls

After 150 years, Bristol's prime music venue is to finally change its name and thereby cut its link to the infamous slave trader Edward Colston.

David Olusoga

That's how I lived for 10 years in Bristol after graduating. I just stayed in my student flat and paid very little rent. It was lovely, and part of me still misses that very lazy lifestyle. I was known as the magician on the street, and I used to dress a little eccentrically in a cloak.

Derren Brown

For centuries my father's family lived on Britain's biggest tidal river, the Severn, on which there was a huge trade with the interior, and through the Port of Bristol with America.

Edward Rutherfurd

I travel a lot with work... to and from Cornwall and Bristol, so I find myself on lots of trains.

Eleanor Tomlinson