There are high spots in all of our lives and most of them have come about through encouragement from someone else. I don't care how great how famous or successful a man or woman may be each hungers for applause.

Quite often I can be in a bookshop standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham yet no one recognises me. I often say I'm a famous author in a country where no one reads.

My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances we've become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.

Being famous is great it's not like bad or horrible or anything.

I had no desire to be famous I just wanted to make the greatest music ever made. I didn't want anyone to know who I was.

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.

I have a great job writing for 'The Office ' but really all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I'll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is like Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean.

Hitler was so modern in that he was obsessed with being famous. He was caught up with this rush to be have achieved greatness before turning 30.

Other famous men those of much talk and few deeds soon evaporate. Action is the dignity of greatness.

I have a profound empathy for people who are in the public eye whether they manifest it themselves or whether it happened by accident - it doesn't matter to me. I think there's a great misunderstanding of what it is to be famous.