“I was 41 when I became a dad. I try to be as much fun as my father was, but I’m at home more – and less of a disciplinarian.”

You can get a decent mouthful of food in Warsaw or Chad if you look hard enough. It’s just I wouldn’t actually go there looking for the food.

My sister’s also very, very competitive but she is more concerned than I am with being liked. So she hides it away. I try to make my competitiveness part of my charm.

My time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants.

The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night.

The good fortune of my life, which has been to turn those glittering nights into my job, all came from there.

I sleep nine hours every night, I have a little nap after lunch, and, if I’m going out for dinner, I sneak in an extra one before I head out.

People think you get paid millions by the BBC if you’re famous, but me? Me, I’m in the Premier Inn in Gillingham.

I have Gordon Ramsay to thank for my TV career because Channel 4 spent a long time trying to find him a sidekick for ‘The F Word’, then he suggested me, knowing I’d stand up to him.

It doesn’t matter how much of a hurry you think you are in. Be one of the people for whom ten minutes does not make a difference.

I think unionization of labour is a great thing.

I always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.

Personally I ride a bicycle, travel by train and bus and campaign tirelessly for a car taxation system that will hammer ignorant, selfish, petty, fat, spoilt, stupid car abusers into giving up their addiction and walking.

I’m just a bit frustrated that in London we make such an effort to ape the New York restaurant scene. I have good friends who ape the New York restaurant scene and do it brilliantly. None of them would claim that the primary reason for going to their restaurant was the food.

As a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.

How clever am I? I’m really quite clever. I mean, look, I’ve got a first-class degree from Oxford.

My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Before we had our becoming here, we existed There, men other than now; we were pure souls.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

We must teach science in the mother tongue. Otherwise, science will become a highbrow activity.

It’s when you get to 60 when everything starts to go pear-shaped. Everyone thinks that becoming an older guy is easy, but you never consider it fully. It comes as quite a shock.

It just seems like we get more popular every eight years or so. For some reason, it becomes cool to like Motorhead again.

Kids are generally rotten until the age of about six, when they become people.

And it was this belief which led to the subject becoming the main theme of our activities at Calcutta from that time onwards.