I was brought up a Catholic, for that you get an A level in guilt.

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?

The strangest thing is at tea breaks, or coffee breaks or lunch, you forget you're a zombie. And you're talking about politics to somebody at the table and you forget that you have a bullet hole in your forehead.

Wisdom isn't an old guy on top of a mountain in a loin cloth. It isn't an answer. It's a question.

People who are willing to get off their arse to search the entire room for the TV remote because they refuse to walk to the TV and change the channel manually.

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.

Now, the country is in a terrible state, and you've blamed it on a number of things: Unemployment rate, the value of the pound and all that... wrll, it's because the national anthem is boring.