Growing up, I was your classic Catholic Irish kid. I went to mass every Sunday. Then in secondary school I went to boarding school, and there was mass seven days a week before breakfast - it may have put me off!

Acting is very much an all-or-nothing job.

I kind of flew into a panic that somebody would have already owned the rights, because Christina Noble's life is such a good story. It took us two full years to get Christina to agree and sign the rights.

You worry about whether you are match-fit, coming back to the stand-up stage.

Some people see Baltimore as a hopeless place. Some have even made a lot of money on it.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

All of my books have the potential to become movies, it's just a question of finding a studio who wants to get behind me and put up the money to make the movie.

We also must pull from our highest ideals of justice and protect against those ills that destabilized our economy - like predatory lending, over-leveraged financial institutions and the unchecked avarice of the past that trumped fairness and common sense. Our platform calls for significant cuts in federal spending.