The important thing is not to be defined by what others think of you.

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.

Do something. Successful achievers wake up in the morning and go to bed in the night. In between their waking up and going to bed is occupied with action, action, action and action.

Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal.

The way you make money is to do something you don't like to do. And that's how you know you're a virtuous person.

A song doesn't just come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out. 'No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; ie, by people relating to one another differently.

The most lucrative work I have done is presenting primetime TV shows. I do not know what other people earn but a six-figure salary is not uncommon.

There is an intuitive knowing within us that we are eternal but this gets covered over with the noise we create while identifying with the impermanent.

[My father] was always saying I'd end up like my grandfather. Okay. My grandfather was an architect, I'm an architect. It's true, certain characteristics are similar.

I don't care with my popularity

The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.