“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.

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