If you travel to the States... they have a lot of different words than like what we use. For instance: they say 'elevator', we say 'lift'; they say 'drapes', we say 'curtains'; they say 'president', we say 'seriously deranged git.'

Dire Straits is a great band. Someone tells you they like ""Brothers in Arms"" and immediately you know they're a stupid annoying git.

If you travel to the States... they have a lot of different words than like what we use. For instance: they say 'elevator', we say 'lift'; they say 'drapes', we say 'curtains'; they say 'president', we say 'seriously deranged git.'

Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git.

Recently, my personal advisors have been telling me to go to America. Actually, people have been walking up to me in the street and telling me to sod off, but that's the same thing, isn't it?

People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.

As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.

But as in all cults, what's central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you're very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.

Dire Straits is a great band. Someone tells you they like 'Brothers in Arms' and immediately you know they're a stupid annoying git.

I am quite girly.

I liked 35 and in both my novels that is the age of the lead characters. I tried making them my age but they just seemed to keep moaning about stuff.

I suppose the common idea of me is that I'm going to be someone who's hyper and cracking jokes all the time, but people who meet me are soon disabused of that notion.

I think that my ideas of the world are that it's random and cruel but kind of quite comical really, and therefore the humour, in a sense, springs from that.

I wanted to write about how people's beliefs shift.

I would say I was still a Marxist - which is not to be confused with being a Communist. Despite its flaws, Marxism still seems to explain the material world better than anything else.

I'm an intellectual.

I'm distinct, really.

I've accentuated the look over the years. As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.

If I won the lottery I'd start a charity that helped little family hardware stores, cobblers and fruit shops open in city centres.

If sitcoms were easy to write, there'd be a lot of good ones, and there aren't.

It always seemed to be a constant that my parents were political.

Most of my friends are women - I quite fancied being a woman in a way.

Most of the Communists I knew were nice people.

Now, as a comic, if you're vaguely amusing you can go straight into TV, then you play the O2 and then everyone's sick of you.

People aren't universally heroic.

People used to think I was just a shouty comic but I was doing stuff about Sartre.

The journalists have obviously failed to capture my innate magnetism, humour and charisma, and they all need to be fired from their newspapers right away.

You can't do comedy with a beard.

You cant do comedy with a beard.

An unexpected benefit of my career in biochemistry has been travel.

The world has become more complex as technology and easy travel mixes cultures without homogenizing them.

Strange - is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.

I think travel is probably the downside of playing professional golf, but you've got to do it.

Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.

The person attempting to travel two roads at once will get nowhere.

Right now I'm so old that if I had a big gush of money, I don't know what I'd do with it. I don't travel anymore. I don't need anything, don't want anything. I'd give it to my son, I guess, and let him enjoy it.

I might have been born in a hovel but I am determined to travel with the wind and the stars.

I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program.

You can't expect the entire world to come to New York to see you. You have to travel to them.

Travel, of course, narrows the mind.

If you have enthusiasm, you have a very dynamic, effective companion to travel with you on the road to Somewhere.

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

Some go on to trade schools or get further training for jobs they are interested in. Some go into the arts, some are craftsmen, some take a little time out to travel, and some start their own businesses. But our graduates find and work at what they want to do.

You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure.

If you travel first class, you think first class and you are more likely to play first class.

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.