If I hadn't done this I might have ended up digging the roads.

What is universal can be surprising. Over time you find the kind of stuff which has people thinking 'That is just something that occurred to me there's something wrong with me', is in fact stuff that is universal.

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

I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.

I quite fancy the 1940s. I like the trams and the trousers.

Two young, fit, healthy attractive people in love? There’s nothing worse to look at in the world.

I grew up in a house where there was lots of teasing and language play and laughter; it was very important. When I was a teenager, you wouldn't go to a bar and find lots of televisions everywhere. People were talking. Talk was the mental fire you would gather around in the evening. It occupied a big part of your existence.