A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.

I did throw a lot of eggs into one basket, as you do in your teenage years - 'I am buying these records, I am wearing this'. I did quite a bit of that. You have to do it, wear your stupid shoes, wear your stupid hair.

You try various things when you're growing up. I was an attache in the Foreign Service for a while and then I drove a bulldozer, but neither of those panned out for me so it had to be stand-up.

One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing.

Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.

I think anyone who makes products has this simultaneous joy and, almost, shame looking at it. You look at it all day, and all you can see is all these things you want to make better.

Doing art at Marlborough, where I went to school, was really quite tough, and I knew that it wasn't the direction I wanted to go. I'd rather show art and give people the joy of seeing it.

If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies instead of the land of corpses.