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.

Is anyone serious about the politics of happiness? David Cameron dipped a toe in the water using the word lightly but denying the hard policies it implies. Labour shies away from it but should take up the challenge.

He who has great power should use it lightly.

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.

Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything or be anyone what do you do with it?

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

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.