There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.

I think that in the future, as more and more money and wealth goes to the 1 per cent, it's going to polarize into the people who are for and anti-freedom. It's not that they'll have a left and a right wing thing, it's going to be a freedom and anti-freedom polarization, I think.

What worries me is the professionalism of everything.

It's only now that I realize that behaviour always has a context and precedents, it's what you do rather than what you are, although we often never recognise that context or understand what these precedents are.

I've always felt really good about England. I've always felt really, really good about Britain.

We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. We develop all those long-winded ideas which just interpret the reality of our lives in different ways, without really extending our body of worthwhile knowledge, about the big things, the real things. Basically, we live a short disappointing life; and then we die. We fill up our lives with shite, things like careers and relationships to delude ourselves that it isn’t all totally pointless.

Conservatives are giving up on democracy because it's not efficient. They want an autocratic regime.