“I find the fact that billionaires are quoted as if the fact that they are billionaires gives them some kind of wisdom is outrageous.”

I’m easy to work with, not a pushover, but I respond to criticism and find it inspiring.

For the past seventeen years I have been experimenting with lager. I am a lager user and one drug leads to another. If you do lager, as night follows day, you’ll end up doing Kentucky Fried Chicken.

There are lots of things I could have done for the money, but I’ve made a great living doing the things I want to do.

I loved writing ‘Two Brothers’ more than anything else I have written. It’s the first book I’ve written that I’ve always known I wanted to write. Having said that, it also kept me awake at nights.

Leaders should never, ever try to look cool – that’s for dictators

I don’t consider myself Jewish. I am half-Jewish by race but not through my mother.

If only the strength of the love that people feel when it is reciprocated could be as intense and obsessive as the love we feel when it is not; then marriages would be truly made in heaven.

People who get through life dependent on other people’s possessions are always the first to lecture you on how little possessions count.

Comedy will always be central to what I do, it’s just an instinct for me, but I am a writer and always have been.

I did not vote Labour because they’ve heard of Oasis and nobody is going to vote Tory because William Hague has got a baseball cap.

And roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is my personal signature dish.

You think I look like a teletubby?

Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.

You didn’t wake up, your dreams just changed gear.

Beyond love, beyond unrequited love, perhaps even beyond any other passion known to humanity, deep, deep in the depths of the turgid, clinging, swamplike pit of despair that lies dormant within every soul, lurks JEALOUSY.

I see dull people as projects … to be reformed

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact – to use Walt Whitman’s definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.

There has to a certain responsibility, whether it’s TV news, online news, to sort out opinion from fact.

The only the way that you can live and function without seeing the facts in front of you is to put yourself in a constant state of denial.

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

You can experience consciousness now by experiencing the fact that you exist.

And Supernatural, in fact, going there wasit felt like a place where I had to actually, um, learn to be kind of manly. I felt like I had to kind of change my, like, way of speaking for a little bit, just to kind of fit in, oddly enough. Which was weird.

The AEC scientists were so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they failed to perceive facts – even widely known ones – that were outside their limited field of vision.