Actors are able to trick themselves into treating anything as if it's fantastic. It's a kind of madness really.
I am a one success man.
I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who, it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring.
I never examined what I did in any great detail because I thought it would spoil things. I never read the scripts at all carefully, and never wanted to know what was going on, because I felt that being a benevolent alien that's the way it should be.
I think quite often a fate worse than death is life - for lots of people.
I'm obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience. But my feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness.
I've had to hold back certain things for legal reasons, or just out of common decency, but I think autobiography has got to be selected confessions, hasn't it? I could have said jolly things about some of the dreadful people I've spent my life with, but it would have been a cheat.
Most drama in our lives is really rather squalid.
Not only don't I know who I am, but I'm very suspicious of people who do know who they are. I am sometimes ten or twelve people a day, and sometimes four or five people an hour!
Politicians are just Daily Mail journalists writ large, aren't they? They're always telling us what's going to happen, and we know they don't know!
The countryside is incredibly boring. There's lots of shagging, lots of murders, lots of sarcasm, lots of treachery, and lots of bad cooking, but it's all hidden. You've got all the space and the flowers, but it's dull!
We have newsreaders behaving like actors, lowering their voices if it's a sad story, as if we didn't know it's a sad story. There isn't a single cool newsreader.
The British may not know much about music, but they certainly loves the noise it makes.
To get rich never risk your health. For it is the truth that health is the wealth of wealth.
Refused to take part in Doctor Who: The Five Doctors.
In 1975, while in character as the Doctor, Tom turned on the Blackpool Illuminations.
At the beginning of his career and prior to his Doctor Who success, Tom was once given the nickname Boiler Suit Tom by the press. He had been supplied for a press conference with some old studio set clothes as he had nothing appropriate to wear.
Jon Culshaw, renowned impersonator and star of the comedy series Dead Ringers has repeatedly done an impersonation of Tom playing the Doctor.
In the late 1990's, it was reported that Tom Baker was a candidate for the role of Gandalf in Peter Jackson's epic adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.
In 2005 a survey of Adults in the United Kingdom, Tom Baker's voice was voted the fourth most recognizable - after Queen Elizabeth, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher.
Father: John Stewart Baker
Height: 6`3
He is the current "elder stateman" of Doctor Who having inherited that unofficial title upon the death of predecessor Jon Pertwee in May 1996.
An image of him appeared in The Simpsons shown in 1995.
He is currently the oldest surving former Doctor Who actor (ahead of Colin Baker by 10 years).
He has performed with the National Theatre, the Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
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