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

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.

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

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

Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar. You have to hold it, you have to read it.

Yes, OK, farty is a silly word. I wish I’d never used it. I’m 34. Perhaps it was a word for my 20s.

Artists don’t create society, they reflect it

If I did things for the money, I’d have done adverts in the 1980s, when I was hot enough to be offered them, and ‘Police Academy 6,’ which I was asked to write.

I’m lucky because the strongest emotion I have ever felt is being in love, and that definitely informs my writing.

I don’t know what people who I’ve never met think about me. Some have written horrible things, some have written nice things – but I’m proud of the fact I’ve remained close to everyone I’ve ever worked with.

No collection of people who are all waiting for the same thing are capable of holding a natural conversation. Even if the thing they are waiting for is only a taxi.

The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.

I think trying to be cool is the worst possible ambition – and I have never suffered from it.

My first album was mainly dealing with street issues, and it was ‘coded’: it was called ‘Reasonable Doubt.’ So the things I was talking about…

For the first time, as a family, they appeared to have an instinct of being in contact, with some strange and unsafe thing.

No plan ever survives its first encounter with the enemy.

You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity.

Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.

My first inspiration for acting came from the first episode of ‘Hannah Montana.’ That’s when I knew I wanted to be a singer and an actress.

Without her presence nothing would have being, because she is the essence of the existence of the first unto the last being.

For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.