He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.

I went abroad to Malaya and came back and tended naturally to gravitate towards the south, I suppose, near London where things seemed to be going on; but I'm still a Lancashire man, and what I want to write someday is a novel about Manchester. Very much a regional novel.

I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your audience as you do if you're writing a book, and you get a bit of money coming in, and you can see more clearly how you're paying the bills. But it's not a good position for the serious novelist to be in.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

I like to joke about being gay because it's something teenagers would never joke about.

Humor connects us, especially in politics. It's a way of surprising one another with shared context and experience.

I wasn't a class clown, I just found at an early age that I was able to make people laugh. So I mostly wrote funny stuff instead of writing what I was supposed to be writing.

You can not have comedy unless people are behaving badly. You can't have it.