One must be very particular about telling the truth. Through truth one can realize God.

I've come to recognize what I call my 'inside interests.' Telling stories. And helping people tell their stories is a sort of interpersonal gardening. My work at NBC News was to report the news but in hindsight I often tried to look for some insight to share that might spark a moment of recognition in a viewer.

There's a wealth of literature out there which hopefully will be you know exploded in the future and I personally find it very rewarding to be involved with classic storytelling and sort of legendary characters.

I've been watching more American TV because of all the great TV series that have come out in the last five to 10 years. I'm a 'Sopranos' fan I'm a 'Wire' fan I'm a 'Mad Men' fan. I'm a 'Deadwood' fan. It makes me optimistic for the future of storytelling on TV that producers are willing to take that kind of jump.

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

Billy Crystal knows how to make people laugh. He's got 30 years on stage... there's no telling him what's funny.

So what I do now is to pre-empt that by making the up into a virtue and telling funny stories about how crap I am before people have a chance to notice it for themselves and think maybe I haven't realised.

Working with Chaplin was very amusing and strange. His films are so funny but working with him I found him to be a very serious man. Whereas the films of Hitchcock are macabre he could be a very funny man to work with always telling jokes and holding court. Of course when I worked with Charlie he was getting older.

Sometimes people get mad at The Simpsons' subversive story telling but there's another message in there which is a celebration of making wild funny stories.

It's funny how people who ain't never been down there can think that America is so fair and that we should be alright. It's funny that the people who have their foot on our neck are telling us 'Get up. What's wrong with you?'