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

"Pressure and stress is the common cold of the psyche."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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