No hope for planet at all. But I will be gone before the planet is gone, so it's your problem.

Political correctness is a bit like a granny, a maiden aunt arriving at a party when everyone's having a good time. And she comes in, they all start sort of buttoning up and becoming self-conscious and behaving properly and then when she leaves, you can have fun again.

My mum died about three years ago at the age of 101, and just towards the end, as she began to run out of energy, she did actually stop trying to tell me what to do most of the time.

I tend to have an odd split in my mind: I tend to look at it as a writer and when the writing thing is OK and I'm happy with it, then I put on my actor's hat.

I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?

Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.

When you're being stalked by an angry mob with raspberries, the first thing to do is to release a tiger.