I don't want to go around making everyone else agree with me. I don't feel the need to do that.

I did not become successful in my work through embracing or engaging in celebrity culture. I never signed away my privacy in exchange for success.

If you chase something too desperately, it eludes you.

When I was a student I was very, very ambitious, completely immersed in my comedy career. I never had that period of reckless hedonism that you should get out of your system in your youth.

I don't like big feet. It reminds me of gammon.

If things don't come easy to you, you have to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

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.

The truth is somewhere in the middle of funny and serious.

The trick is always to write in pairs because if at least two people find it funny, you've immediately halved the odds of it not being funny.

I think if you try to look for something to show off as an actor, vanity can get the better of you.

I am of the very last generation who didn't have computers at school. As we grow old we'll become something of an aberration.

Mindful living is a conscious way of living – noticing the beauty of life in every moment.

Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

There's a starting place. And that starting place for everyone is ambition. We're all scared of that word today because they made it bad in the late '80s. As if desire is not a good thing.

I often tell people in the clinics, the human possesses the one thing that means more to the horse than anything in the world, and that is peace and comfort.

Have you an unexpurgated copy of Hannah More's 'Letters to a Village Maiden'?

We were idealists. We thought that when we got the vote the whole pattern of politics would be greatly improved and would be dominated by women.

I look crazy. I know I do. Been true since I was a kid!

There can be no truer faith than the one you might have in yourself.

Any literature, when it arrives at being good literature, transcends genre.