The moment I'm perceived to be even a tiny bit successful, my career will go down the pan.

My life's ambition is to play a James Bond villain. I have the cat and the eye-patch, so I'm just waiting for the call. For some reason, though, the phone hasn't rung.

I really like the Observer. I think I'd love to have a column with a broad reach that would enable me to do some proper reporting, but keep it on sort of a humorous level. I've always had a very happy experience writing for them.

The moment I'm perceived to be even a tiny bit successful, my career will go down the pan.

America thinks of itself as a meritocracy, so people have more respect for success and more contempt for failure.

I expect that in 40 years' time I'll be writing political tomes and working for an organisation like Oxfam.

I was every Londoner's stereotypical idea of a brash, vulgar American. When I got here, it turned out that London was the Wild West, and New York was like London at the height of the Victorian era, in which everyone was far more obsessed with table manners and status-climbing than they are in London. In London, everyone was just crawling over this blizzard of cocaine. Here, if you have more than a glass of wine with your meal, people refer you to Alcoholics Anonymous.