I exercise hard and the reason I do is so that I can earn the things I like to consume.

I'm easy to work with, not a pushover, but I respond to criticism and find it inspiring.

And roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is my personal signature dish.

No collection of people who are all waiting for the same thing are capable of holding a natural conversation. Even if the thing they are waiting for is only a taxi.

You didn't wake up, your dreams just changed gear.

The Germans are a cruel race. Their operas last for six hours and they have no word for fluffy.

The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.

People who get through life dependent on other people's possessions are always the first to lecture you on how little possessions count.

We've all got to look at ourselves, start with yourself, that's all you can do. I believe that we can act responsibly as a group, it's just that there are vested interests telling us not to bother.

Leaders should never, ever try to look cool - that's for dictators

If only the strength of the love that people feel when it is reciprocated could be as intense and obsessive as the love we feel when it is not; then marriages would be truly made in heaven.

For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.

If my goal is simply to survive the journey, then I’m not on the journey in the first place.

Life is half spent before we know what it is.

The teenage years are ridiculously crucial and hard and, um, awkward.

It is a sort of great Victorian truth that actually, trying to do the right thing is pretty good for you and pretty good for business as well, by and large.

When you get older, then you feel death not at the end of the road, but death all around you, in everything. Life is saturated with death. I feel death everywhere.

We cannot change our rulers, but we can change the way they rule us.

I'm very eclectic in my music tastes - anything from Nina Simone to Beethoven to Talvin Singh.

Hunger allows no choice.