I used to have a house in London, but couldn't face 20 more years of St John's Wood in the rain.

Talent is always more interesting - ambition is not interesting. If you have talent, you have to find ways of expressing it, but you may not be a success in the world's terms.

You could write a joke in the pub at lunchtime and watch it performed on television that evening.

Life has a very simple plot: first you're here and then you're not.

I used to collect Persian rugs and real estate - you should be able to walk on and live in your money. I had to give up the rugs because I'm allergic to mould.

I live in a Spanish-style hillside home in Los Angeles, California. I paid $900,000 in 1995. It's perhaps worth about $3m now. Thankfully, I paid off my mortgage before the crash because I could see it coming. I worried that I would be caught having to pay off a very high mortgage for a house I couldn't sell.

Monty Python only became valuable when it was sold to Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in America. They didn't pay much either, but the series has been shown repeatedly, which led to lucrative tapes, CDs and DVDs.