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?

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."

Ally MacLeod thinks that tactics are a new kind of mint.

There's no such thing as bad weather - only the wrong clothes.

Who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what did he think he was doing at the time?

If you don't know how to meditate at least try to spend some time every day just sitting.

I’ve come in and out of America for… well, I’ve lived here for 15 years. And I’ve played here for nearly 30 years. On and off. But I’ve always played to my fan base. And I can come and do two or three nights in New York or two or three nights in L.A., and all that. But when I go away, nobody knows I’ve been gone. You know, I don’t get reviewed or anything like that. So that’s why I’ve come back and done a longer time in a smaller place, in New York. It’s always the people who live here that get a chance to know me.