I never had any desire to be famous. I find people who do really sad. I genuinely feel sorry for them because there is nothing of substancein their lives. I am happy when I am writing or performing. Not when I sit there being "famous". I like recognition for my work, but not recognition for being "that bloke off the telly". It is genuinely humbling when a woman comes up to me, as someone did recently, to say she wanted to commit suicide after her husband died, and my show cheered her up and made her feel better. That's great.

Me, myself, personally, I like to keep myself private. I have never said I am a paragon of virtue, a model of morality. I simply do what I do.

In my mind God made Adam and Eve, he didn't make Adam and Steve.

I never had any desire to be famous. I find people who do really sad. I genuinely feel sorry for them because there is nothing of substancein their lives. I am happy when I am writing or performing. Not when I sit there being "famous". I like recognition for my work, but not recognition for being "that bloke off the telly". It is genuinely humbling when a woman comes up to me, as someone did recently, to say she wanted to commit suicide after her husband died, and my show cheered her up and made her feel better. That's great.

I like comedy, but I like comedy as a device in drama. It's more interesting for me to use comedy to seduce people into thinking about something serious. If you want to hit a beat in a drama, you can distract people with a little comedy, and you can punch them in the gut with some emotion.

A friend of mine once said he like his women like his parmesan: strong smelling and shaved. I don't agree with that, but I don't like hairy women.

I do like to make people cringe. That discomfort, tension, embarrassment, pain - all of those things interest me, and not through some sort of masochistic or sadistic impulse. It illuminates what being a human being is. It taps into what it is to be human more incisively than stuff that's just very pedestrian.