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.

There are two types of wine essentially, and everybody knows this. There's the one where you drink it and go, "Mmmm, well that's ok, can we get 8 of those please, give us 8 of those." There's the other one, you know, where you go "Ga... bt... Jesus, WHAT is that?" Very, very occasionally I concede you will hit a subtle one. You know, where you go "Ga... ba... ah, actually that's not that bad, that is. It's quite nice."

I know there's similar dissatisfaction in America. There's a lot of white people who come from blue collar backgrounds and who feel ill-equipped and badly served by modern economics and the modern job market.

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.

The East is very mysterious to Westerners. Even post-Cold War, it's still an unknown entity.

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

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