“All I care about is that people who like me think I’m funny. I get on with writing pretty straight-down the line, old-fashioned stuff.”

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.

Gradually, I developed opinions about food, and my French friends taught me that you have to complain in a restaurant.

My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.

When I tell people I spent almost a year in Paris, I know they imagine something out of a Woody Allen movie, which it wasn’t, of course. I was just working in a clothes shop, but I was aware that it was exciting.

Have you ever been to the countryside? It’s so small. And there’s nothing to do.

Mineral water is a preposterous vanity, either bottled in glass which is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic that ends up in one of the plastic patches the size of Texas occupying our oceans.

The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all.

There are times in all of our lives when a reliance on gut or intuition just seems more appropriate – when a particular course of action just feels right.

It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.

At quite uncertain times and places, The atoms left their heavenly path, And by fortuitous embraces, Engendered all that being hath. And though they seem to cling together, And form ‘associations’ here, Yet, soon or late, they burst their tether, And through the depths of space career.

For ‘Conan,’ I had to eat boiled chicken breast and work out all the time and basically eat like a bird every two hours and stay ripped.

I sing a lot, so if I have lipstick, it gets all over the microphone, so I rarely wear lipstick.

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

No matter what anybody says, we can’t have it all. Not if you are a woman. Not yet.