Try to catch a trout and experience the glorious feeling of letting it go and seeing it swimming away.

Chic Murray once told me he fell in the street, and a woman said to him, "Did you fall?" He said, "No, I'm tryin' to break a bar of chocolate in my back pocket."

As soon as I got successful, the Scottish press started picking on me. It's something they reserve just for me.

Nothing means anything here. When they pull down an outstanding building, no one objects. Oh, maybe there's a wee protest from some collectors or something who take a picture of it before it vanishes.

Behind the proscenium arch, you can't always hear what people in the audience are saying.

When you're eating something and someone asks 'Is that nice?' No it's really revolting - I always eat stuff I hate.

Well, the film's not only pricking the pomposity of the Church, it's pricking the pomposity, and sometimes you would think fraudulence, of the insurance companies. I had never read anything like this until I was doing the film, but Mark [Joffe, the director] and people showed me stuff where, like a flood, it mattered where the water came from. If you're flooded from above, you get the money; if you're flooded from below, you don't. What's that about?