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.

The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now...cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. 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.

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.

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

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