“The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value.”

I exercise hard and the reason I do is so that I can earn the things I like to consume.

And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they’ve read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence.

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?

The best stroked putt in a lifetime does not bring the aesthetic satisfaction of a perfectly hit wood or iron shot.

Just because something happens to be legal does not make it moral, ethical or right.

No supernatural can exist for the mankind that does not want to believe it.

When one does not understand death, life can be very confusing.

How much does the universe weigh, when it fasts for infinity?

Whenever we feel that we are definitely right, so much so that we refuse to open up to anything or anybody else, right there we are wrong. It becomes wrong view.

Where does peace arise? Peace arises whenever we let something go.

Things are simply the way they are. They don’t give us suffering. Like a thorn: Does a sharp thorn give us suffering?