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.

Women are like canoes, full of soup. At first everyone is suspicious but then everyone wants one.

I’ve always been a big consumer of American journalism over the years and had an interest in the history of it and of the press in America; how it has changed.

I have no qualifications to do anything else and there weren't any formal application forms you had to fill in for stand-up, so I thought I'd give that a twist.

Religion is the yeast of death cakes. It is the most awful agent on a vulnerable mind. It's the refuge of alienated and lonely people. It's what people had before television. It yokes people together into an imaginary world. It is just people talking to their imaginary friends, at length. I wouldn't mind, but some of the people are world leaders.

You can see desperation in people who are too eager to laugh because they're in such a hurry not to look at what's confronting them in their lives and that's kind of sad because there's a kind of pornographic aspect to it, of making some sort of pain go away, of hovering around a pain, making yourself numb, not feel anything.

The American political machinery is awesome to behold in its scale and expense and waste and madness. It's the greatest circus on Earth I suppose.