Sometimes the only way to deal with horrific things in life is through a dark sense of humor.

You learn timing on the road. You learn structure and how to read an audience. You learn so much about the business of laughter that you can't learn on a set because it's all on you. Sometimes you bomb and you know not to tell that joke again... You just hope people find the humor in the awkwardness.

That's the way both they and I travel sometimes. Pick road at random and when it's time to pull over you pull over and hope you can find a place to crash.

Sometimes I feel I hope I am not taking advantage of my stardom.

Well I've been reading a lot about the fifty years since the Second World War about Western foreign policy and all that. I try not to let it get to me but sometimes I just think that there's no hope.

I love the Beatles. I haven't named any kids after them but I still really love them. They were the first group that I was ever properly aware of. In my early teens I would sometimes stay in and listen to the radio all day in the hope that I would catch a song by them that I'd never heard before and be able to tape it on my radio-cassette player.

I do sometimes strongly hope that in a past life my most recent life before this I was absolutely horrible evil hideous. Because otherwise - well hell to even things up next time around I'm going to have to pay for this one am I not?

We will have to give up the hope that if we try hard we somehow will always do right by our children. The connection is imperfect. We will sometimes do wrong.

When hope is not pinned wriggling onto a shiny image or expectation it sometimes floats forth and opens.

A lot of people because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed to be the repository of other people's hope.