Nowadays - and I don't want to make some dopey cultural statement here - everyone can be, just by existing in society, because we all have a ship that we follow. Even if it's other people, like on MySpace pages, we're just as collective of enthusiasts now. That seems to be the world we're in.

Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.

I have a lot of friends who were stand-ups, and they just stopped after a while, because they didn't like that battle, or they just couldn't do it. And then they would get on a sitcom and get visible and get back into it, because the audience was just way easier on them. But they lost those crucial years of learning to turn any audience into your audience.

Nowadays - and I don't want to make some dopey cultural statement here - everyone can be, just by existing in society, because we all have a ship that we follow. Even if it's other people, like on MySpace pages, we're just as collective of enthusiasts now. That seems to be the world we're in.

It’s the method of consumption, not what’s on the plate.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, 'Well, I've had it with humanity.' But I was wrong.

I'm such a bookworm, and I'm such a people-watcher. It took the Internet a while to catch on in Ireland, because the culture there is, you go to the pub and talk to people there, and that's how you get the news and all the gossip. You just do it face to face. And culturally, you just couldn't understand.