[Washington] is the political capital. It's essentially a big office.

America is this incredible mosaic of immigrants, so people really want to be anchored in some kind of culture as well as the one they are living in.

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

I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.

I have a very low level of recognition, which is fine by me.

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."

You're talking to a modern, nice, affable German person and they're saying to you something like 'You know, vell, it's a critical time now for Germany within Europe, also globally, economically ve are pretty good, ve have been better. But ve are very vibrant in the theater and arts...' and all the time you'll be listening to this, you're thinking Mmm, yeah, mmm... Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.