Absolute faith can blind you to the consequences of the actions you allow. It can tell you it's okay to drop bombs on another country, or that it's okay to hate a group of people such as homosexuals.

You can (be a middle-aged comic) if you work very hard at it, because comedy is really hard.

I have deep respect for people's individual faith, but when faith gets connected to the machinery of state, or the machinery of hate, I find it very confronting.

I've become a much more serious young insect.

Comedy is a very personal thing, as you would know if you've ever told the same joke to two people and had one of them laugh their head off and the other one look at you as though you were a completely cretin.

We live in a society that worships youth. On television, in magazines, in advertisements and on billboards, what sells and what is sold to us is youth.

If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.

A poll earlier this year showed that 42 per cent of Americans believe we're in the End Times.

I didn't like the nervous tension of being a public person.

I think I was a feminist before the word was invented. By the time I came across feminist books by American or European writers, I realised that there was an articulate way or a language to express all these feelings that I had had for years and years and so I became a raging feminist as a young woman.

The world is infinitely more complex than it appeared to me 15 years ago.

Pressure and stress is the common cold of the psyche.