There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction...no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time.

Nothing is covered adequately by the BBC. The BBC has become the biggest disappointment - they're just so terrified. And in a way it's not their fault: the parties have used them as a political football.

The first time I went to West Virginia I was surprised by how poor it was. It was like north India, there's kids running around in bare feet. The white working class has been disenfranchised as well. It's been disenfranchised by the liberal-left as well as the conservative-right. You really have to get people right across America and Britain and Europe and the world as a whole concentrating on the economic issues that affect them, because when you don't have that, you have all these phony, racist and cultural wars, and sexist wars.

I think [Ecstasy] was a really good stab. It wasn't my strongest book or my strongest material, but they wanted to make a kinda "rave culture" movie.

I think that Europe has to get its act together very quickly. The Belgian guy who's leading the negotiations against Brexit, he sees it as a whole chance to reboot Europe and reclaim the kind of social mission of Europe from all this corporate, bureaucratic, globalist stuff that has got into, building Europe for the people rather than the banks, again.

Bad luck is usually transmitted by close proximity to habitual sufferers.

Some people are easier to love when you don't have to be around them.