My life's ambition is to play a James Bond villain. I have the cat and the eye-patch, so I'm just waiting for the call. For some reason, though, the phone hasn't rung.

People in London think of London as the center of the world, whereas New Yorkers think the world ends three miles outside of Manhattan.

I miss being fawned over by restaurateurs and chefs.

I expect that in 40 years' time I'll be writing political tomes and working for an organisation like Oxfam.

I tried being a mechanic and I tried catering, but I realized I had even less aptitude for semi-skilled labour than for academic work.

Everyone said to me growing up, "You're like an American. You have to go to America. That's your spiritual home."

I've become a professional failure - in order to pay the mortgage I have to remain unemployed. Luckily, a disaster always seems to befall me at exactly the right moment.

I don't envy young Brits crossing the Atlantic to make their fortunes today.

Top Chef is a very smooth-running machine. All the people working there are incredibly professional and absolutely at the top of their game.

I wouldn't describe myself as a master of anything.

There's no reason why you can't deliver a grammar-school curriculum to an all-ability intake.

Wisdom comes from education and experience—not from age.

The last word in an argument is what a wife has. Anything a husband says after that is the beginning of another argument.

Coffee arrived and the espresso was excellent, like an aromatic electric fence.

You may be right,' she said, a phrase which here meant 'I’m wrong, but I don’t have the courage to say so.

Sometimes crazy just isn't enough.

As you know, I describe Shirat ha-Yam as part of an epic story that has qualities of history and which also has qualities of the mythological, of an epic.

But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.

Perfect reason flees all extremity, and leads one to be wise with sobriety.

The first and the best victory is to conquer self.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.