On the other hand [making a string of one-off episodes], there's a real freedom, because you're kind of reinventing the show every week.

If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side-effects?

The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It's easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It's less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.

My theory is that we used to have several personalities, and now we're encouraged to have one online.

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning.

That's not something that we've gone in thinking 'Right! How are we going to examine that now?' It's just when you take a step back you see that they're actually all sort of in that mode.

Whenever anything nice happens in the world I always expect something appalling to happen immediately afterwards.

I'm actually quite pro-technology, but I'm a worrier, so I like to envision worst-case scenarios.

Technology by default became the thing that was a new thing that had swept in and was altering it everything.

The iPad falls between two stools - not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it's the spork of the electronic consumer goods world.

In summary, our world is doomed.

I don't snack. I don't generally eat sweets or drink soda. I never eat between meals or even before big ones.

It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive.

The rose does not bloom without thorns. True, but would that the thorns did not outlive the rose.

You can pass all the gun legislation you want. None of it will make me feel any more or less safe than I do right at this moment.

Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.

Be charitable and indulge to everyone, but thyself.

Truly different behaviors require truly distinct situations.

You know how to stop abortion? Require that each one occur with a gun.

My study is a converted garage which is largely lined with bookshelves and cardboard boxes filled with manuscripts of my film scripts, plays and books.