When I was growing up, I didn't like cheese. I had to wean myself onto cheese.

I didn't know I was poor, growing up, because everyone was in the same boat. I couldn't have bikes. It never really bothered me, but I could have any book. I loved school; I loved learning. Yeah, I never cared for possessions. I still don't, really.

Pol Pot - he rounded up anybody he thought was intellectual and had them executed. And how he told someone was intellectual or not was whether they wore glasses. If they're that clever, take them off when they see him coming!

There's no difference between fame and infamy now. There's a new school of professional famous people that don't do anything. They don't create anything.

In the 1990s, it's OK to do comedy about the Chernobyl disaster or the Space Shuttle blowing up. It's acceptable to ridicule the Pope or the President of the United States, but God forbid you do a joke... about gays. The gay community is the last sacred cow in this society.

Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

Sit Here and Cry' was one of the first songs I wrote with that overdramatic sarcastic dry sense of humor, which is why the energy of the song doesn't necessarily reflect the subject matter.