As a shy kid growing up in Sheffield I fantasized about how it would be great to be famous so I wouldn't actually have to talk to people and feel awkward. And of course as we all know from fairy stories when you achieve that ambition you find out you don't want it.

Look at Jessica Simpson. She's famous for being dumb. I guess it started with Marylyn Monroe and she actually wasn't that dumb but that's how she was perceived - and that's what got popular.

I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings Bar Mitzvahs funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.

By the time I was 30 nobody would work with me. I was friendless I was hopeless I was suicidal lost my family - I mean it was bad. Bottomed out didn't know what I was going to do. I actually thought I was going to be a chef - go to work in a kitchen someplace.

I think my father would have liked to have been an artist actually. But I think he didn't quite have perhaps the drive or I don't know I mean he had a family to bring up I suppose.

I would like to be remembered as a man who had a wonderful time living life a man who had good friends fine family - and I don't think I could ask for anything more than that actually.

I am the baby in the family and I always will be. I am actually very happy to have that position. But I still get teased. I don't mind that.

I've spent the last 50 years or so steeping myself in the world's religions and I've done my homework. I've gone to each of the world's eight great religions and sought out the most profound scholars I could find and I've apprenticed myself to them and actually practiced each faith.

I have a disproportionate amount of faith in the goodness of the world and that everything will actually work out okay.

For me and I suspect for lots of other people too bad things actually sometimes make you think more about faith and the fact that you're not facing these things on your own.

Has Bill Clinton inspired idealism in the young as he himself was inspired by John F. Kennedy? Or has he actually reduced their idealism? Surely part of the answer lies in Clinton's personal moral lapse with Monica Lewinsky. But more important was his sin of omission - his failure to embrace a moral cause beyond popularity.

The vast majority of large scale change efforts fail. Which means that the probability that you have actually experienced a failure and your people know that and are pessimistic therefore about trying something again is very high.

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.

One must never assume that a character is sympathetic because of either the actor playing them or the fact that they're a lead. I think that's a recipe for failure actually because if they become unsympathetic you lose your audience.

I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.

And actually about three weeks ago Micky Peter and I were in Vegas at the MGM Grand. And we did about 12 shows in seven days. It was quite an experience.

Well I stopped drinking. That was actually a big deal. I didn't go through any harrowing rock-bottom experience. I just made a decision to stop drinking.