The terror of failure can make you feel like a failure. So a bunch of people think you're not very good at your thing. How much do you invest in what they say? How much do you care? Failure is not putting yourself on the line.

The trend now is to get away from stage bound sitcoms.

That's a rather flippant quote "drinking and writing bad poetry" from me. I mean, I said it, but I was doing other stuff too. I certainly didn't manage the full stretch of four years.

Home gigs can be hard because it's an odd collision. More than anything, I feel self-conscious when my family are in the audience. I'm doing this job which is not quite acting - part of it is me, part performance. You're presenting a cartoon of yourself to people who know you as a line-drawing.

When things are going well, I can't write fast enough to keep up with my mind. Writing walks, speech runs and talk flies. Other times, though, it's like fishing.

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

I do not walk around imaging myself to be intimidating or smart.