The problem with suicide is that it seems so flamboyant. It's camp. You have to be a bit of a drama queen to ever seriously consider it.

Everything I think of now is too rude to actually say.

We do have a big kind of history in literate tradition of Vikings and we have a lot of Viking blood in Scotland, I mean especially up north wherever you go you see a plastic Viking sitting outside a shop and Viking calendars and - because they - you know they came down and stole all our chicks and then some of them didn't quite get back and ended up settling down here. So there's a lot of Viking blood in Scotland.

I have a beard. Just not on my face.

I'm a terrible interviewer. I'm not a journalist - although I have a Peabody Award - and I'm not really a late-night host. What I am is honest.

I used to believe, like many people who come from poor backgrounds, that it gave me an edge, but I think that's just something we have to tell ourselves to get by sometimes. I don't believe that anymore. Children of privilege can be just as talented and clever as anybody else.

I knew that I had been partially right in the storeroom above the bar on Christmas Day. Whoever I had become had to die.