We are both drawn to surreal situations so the writing was a joy.

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.

I write all the time, but you just want to be careful what you put out. That's all. You want to have the confidence that you've done what you need to do to it, because otherwise it's an exercise in vanity.

I'll have to look into [Washington] D.C. a bit more. I know it's given over to the administration and the bureaucracy connected to it. It's a super-organism of the American state. But there's also a parallel city in there where normal people live.

He could dismiss several schools of philosophy by shifting slightly in his chair or toting his whisky glass.

I do think it's perfectly natural and human to want to invest belief in something. It's just a facet of who we are. What do I believe in? I believe in the obvious things. The people I'm close to and my work - it's not complicated.

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.