I think I'm becoming more relaxed in front of a camera. I suppose I'll always feel slightly more at home on stage. It's more of an actor's medium. You are your own editor nobody else is choosing what is being seen of you.

And so our goal on health care is if we can get instead of health care costs going up 6 percent a year it's going up at the level of inflation maybe just slightly above inflation we've made huge progress. And by the way that is the single most important thing we could do in terms of reducing our deficit. That's why we did it.

A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.

None of us had any idea of how successful Downton was going to be. I thought I was signing up for another period drama that had a slightly modern feel. It had a freedom about it because it was coming out of the head of Julian Fellowes. Anything could happen and generally did.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

Everybody has basically the same family it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.

Even in a gleefully negative comic there is optimism although it's slightly hidden: It comes out through a comic character's sheer tenacity. He keeps going and trying to find some sort of fulfillment regardless of his perpetual failure record. That's a form of hope a form of optimism. Really hokey I know but it's true.

In Dreams... well I was slightly overcompensating with that. I was a bit like a director for hire so maybe I was putting too much imagery that was familiar to me into it.

Like many of you I've always been slightly obsessed with vampires dating back to the prime-time series 'Dark Shadows ' which I followed avidly as a kid.

Even if I tried to be my dad it would be a mediocre slightly embarrassing version.