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.

I fear we might be losing the basic human facility to be alone - and with that you throw out independent decision-making, what to trust, what not to trust; key stuff - a perilous loss.

Tequila? It's not even a drink. It's a way for having the cops around without using a phone.

I thought The Office was good, though I didn't think of it as a sitcom, just as a very good programme.

Its not easy being a man you know. I had to get dressed today… and there are other pressures.

It's such a bullshit move. Transparently so. It's obviously supposed to give succor to people who feel pissed off because someone from another country got a job that they feel should've been given to them. But that's what people voted against here. They voted against the movement of labor - that kind of fluidity - because they want a Britain that no longer exists, and they can't get it.

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.