The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.

Once I took to Twitter and shared those jokes, they became a huge hit. My following grew, and some of the posts got thousands of retweets. With so many shares, money from sponsors followed.

People spending more of their own money on routine health care would make the system more competitive and transparent and restore the confidence between the patients and the doctors without government rationing.

We no longer live in a world that is neatly divided between rich and well-educated countries, and poor and badly-educated ones.

I didn't have the money to put myself through drama school, so I thought - naively - that if I wrote a play and put it on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, agents would see me and that would be my ticket to Hollywood. I wrote a musical; an acting coach saw it and put me on his course for free while I wrote for his company.