The two biggest meals of your life you don't have to cook and you don't get to eat. The first you don't eat because no man eats - or cares what he eats - at his wedding. The second you don't eat because, well, no man eats at his funeral, either.

I was working for Martin Finnegan. He was my best mate in racing. I went to his wedding in November 2007. No-one else from the racing world was invited apart from me and my girlfriend. The funeral was the following May.

I'm used to being in front of camera and knowing what to think. But if you're asking me to be me, I get very self-conscious. My job isn't to be me. Being an actor, people think you can do a eulogy at a funeral, a speech at a wedding. I find all that very nerve-racking.

You can easily take photographs at a wedding - no one would question it. But funerals are different.

As a pastor, you get invited into the most poignant moments of people's lives. Whether it's a wedding or a funeral or a hospital visit, you get invited into the center of the event, whether or not you know the people.

My biggest blast-off hit was 'You Raise Me Up.' If you ever have a wedding or a funeral, it's a good pick.

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning; for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men.

I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

My solo album is dead and buried. We had the funeral. It was sad and I cried a lot but it made such a beautiful corpse that we had an open casket.

They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.

My biggest pet peeve is when you go to a fine restaurant, and it's like a mausoleum inside. Good food should be joyful. There should be laughter and chatter, not people sitting there like they're in a funeral-parlor waiting room.

I was raised Catholic. Not just a little bit Catholic, like my wife, Catherine. When she was young, many Catholics in France already barely went to church, except for the big three: baptism, marriage, and funeral. And only the middle one was by choice.

A wedding is a funeral where you smell your own flowers.

I used to work in a funeral home to feel good about myself, just the fact that I was breathing.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

My mum passing away wasn't funny, but that funeral and what I went through, the things that happened, looking back at it, there were funny moments. You have to be strong enough to look back at it, to sit and assess the situation.

The easiest time to be funny is during a fairly serious situation. That way, you can break the ice. It's crazy, but even at funerals, people will get huge laughs.

That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'?

There have been times when I've felt inappropriately emotional. I remember making 'The Most Hated Family in America' about the Westboro Baptist Church, and being on the way to a funeral of a U.S. soldier with the Phelps family; they were going to picket the funeral.

Success is a public affair. Failure is a private funeral.

If you carefully consider what you want to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success.

I don't have any set things that I'm looking for, like, 'I've done this now I want to do this,' kind of thing. Just read the material, if it appeals, if it makes me laugh: like, 'Death at a Funeral' made me laugh out loud.

I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.