TV is easier: it's all planned out for you and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up but when you are in a comedy club you have to be really funny to win them over.

I think I have an inner confidence that my tastes are pretty simple that what I find funny finds a wide audience. I'm not particularly intellectual or clever or minority-focused in my creative instincts. And I'm certainly not aware of suppressing more sophisticated ambitions.

I think there have always been funny women from Carol Burnett to Joan Rivers. When the audience sees a woman they innately know she's worked twice as hard to get there she's had to prove that she can be the leader first and then be funny on top of it. She has to emit a confidence that she's in control.

I love readings and my readers but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud and that the jig is up. Surely someone will rise up from the audience and say out loud that not only am I not funny and helpful but I'm annoying and a phony.

I was so afraid to even read a paper in front of my classmates. It is very funny because at that point my teachers would never have believed that I could speak in front of an audience of over 2 000 people.

People ask 'How does doing a film compare to doing an ad?' Well when you're doing a commercial you don't have to sell tickets. You have a captured audience. Which is actually completely rare and great it gives you a lot of freedom. When you make a film you have to do advertisements for the film.

To her audience Janis Joplin has remained a symbol artifact and reminder of late Sixties youth culture. Her popularity never derived from her musical ability but from her capacity to link her fantasies of freedom and immortality with ours.

Revolution! The people howls and cries Freedom that's what we're needing! We've needed it for centuries our arteries are bleeding. The stage is shaking the audience rock. The whole thing is over by nine o'clock.

If it's total freedom I guess the ultimate thing you can go into is total silence between the audience and performer with the performer projecting something he doesn't even have to play.

Watching President Obama apologize last week for America's arrogance - before a French audience that owes its freedom to the sacrifices of Americans - helped convince me that he has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions.