I can't swim. I can't drive, either. I was going to learn to drive but then I thought, well, what if I crash into a lake?

What is universal can be surprising. Over time you find the kind of stuff which has people thinking 'That is just something that occurred to me there's something wrong with me', is in fact stuff that is universal.

I find it incredibly boring when people are mean about some individuals, especially if the individual has no power. I can understand how someone deems it necessary if somebody is in power to tear them down - I think that's really crucial. I make a lot of mean jokes about myself; as a theme, suffering seems to me a very interesting thing for comedy, but not the suffering of a particular individual.

I don't go to different countries to criticise their political system and tell them what they should be doing - what do I know?

The characters can't be wittier than people are in real life. They have to be character witty.

A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.

I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself.