There are lots of actors, and you need a way to stand out. Writing comedy sketches was a way of doing that.

Hackney gets a bit of a bad rap, but it's the only place I've ever lived that felt like a community. I know my neighbours.

I always, always want to make people laugh. In every situation. Even when it's inappropriate.

I never used to see anything on TV where the man was in the weaker position. It was always the female showing emotion, breaking down, being emotionally torn apart by men.

I'll cry anywhere because I can do it quite subtly. Walking, that's a good time to have a cry.

Comedians... they're different from actors. There's more ego there. They create the whole thing, I guess, so they're more precious.

Personally, my twenties were a complete waste of time. Professionally, I hope some good came of them.

I love Sutton House in Clapton, a beautiful example of Tudor architecture.

I'm the person who will go to a wedding and switch the place cards around because I don't want to sit next to someone I don't know, because I'm so bad at chatting to strangers.

Spending way too long worrying about what people think about me is a bad habit.

I was the kid who liked making other people laugh, so maybe the comedy came before the acting.

You know, parenting is so personal. And we're all afraid that we didn't quite get it right. And it feels like the stakes are so high. By we - what if we made a mistake?

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

I'm a monster, you know. I'm one of the dangerous ones. No you aren't, he promised. Your one of us.

I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.

Harry [Redknapp] is going to be literally, literally pulling his hair out.

I'll admit I'm a workaholic.

If you know much about your work - why you work, how you work, your aims - you are probably not a poet.

What is behind homosexual marriage. It's really more about the destruction of the traditional family than about exalting homosexuality, because you need to destroy also loyalty to the family.

I was raised by my grandmother on a farm, where we were really poor - we had dirt floors - but so did everybody else.

Our lives are not dependent on whether or not we have conflict. It is what we do with conflict that makes the difference.