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.

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.

I try hard not to preach, but I get carried away, which is a mistake, but it's a risk worth running.

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.

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.

Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.

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.

We've all got to look at ourselves, start with yourself, that's all you can do. I believe that we can act responsibly as a group, it's just that there are vested interests telling us not to bother.

I'm easy to work with, not a pushover, but I respond to criticism and find it inspiring.

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!

And roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is my personal signature dish.

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 don't consider myself Jewish. I am half-Jewish by race but not through my mother.

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.

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

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

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.

I think it is very difficult to legislate for morality.

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

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

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.

My parents were secular. I am an atheist.

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.

You didn't wake up, your dreams just changed gear.

I just use my muscles as a conversation piece, like someone walking a cheetah down 42nd Street.

Food was a constant topic of conversation in our household.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.

What I think we need to do to engage the American people in a conversation about entitlement reform is to have a bipartisan group of people who come together and put every solution on the table, every alternative on the table. And then we ought to engage in a long conversation with the American people so they understand the choices.

It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.

If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation - what are they? They are the happiest people in the world.

Although there exist many thousand subjects for elegant conversation, there are persons who cannot meet a cripple without talking about feet.

I've been in a serious conversation with one of my children, and a fan has come up. I've been in a public bathroom and had the hand come under the stall with a paper and pen. That sort of thing anybody can live without.

Tonight was a great opportunity to take on the political status quo that has given us trillion dollar deficits and put millions out of work. Our objective was to inject some common sense into the conversation among Republicans at a time when business-as-usual simply won't work.

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

I can wear a hat or take it off, but either way it's a conversation piece.

The difficulty with this conversation is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.

A good pun may be admitted among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.

I spend a good portion of my dinner-party conversation defending America because no matter what the political agenda, it's still a fantastic, amazing place.

Well, my closest friends are still the ones that I went to school with, but it's nice to go to work, at the studios, and have people there that you're willing to talk to and have a good conversation with.

There was a sense of all the things that go on on the street, particularly in New York, that you are just completely unaware of, that that conversation could be happening at any time. I loved the instability of the camera. It's just an unstable world.

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.

If you are ever at a loss to support a flagging conversation, introduce the subject of eating.

The dining room in my old house was truly magnificent, but by far the worst room for conversation. I'd get up from the table, a very long table, and somebody would always say, Paul, I never got to talk to you.

His struggle for a bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening school. In time he learned to read, to follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly; and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day.