I'm fascinated by how you'll change your position so many times over a lifetime, but really what you're doing is occupying a series of positions on a landscape.
I don't really think of myself as an actor.
In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways.
When I was a child, I wanted to watch things that made me laugh. It's attacking boredom, as simple as that. I was 19 when I first went to a comedy club - I wanted to do it, so I gave it a try and that was it. I found my office.
Paper acts as an eraser on the mind, as soon as you look at what you've written.
If I hadn't done this I might have ended up digging the roads.
You know, people sometimes say to me, 'Do you prefer to do this or that, act or do stand-up or write' but the thing that I enjoy most is the difference between all of them, because you're always learning. I don't go around thinking of myself as a great anything. I'm actually lucky to have the chance to fail at all of them.
Have I had therapy? I went to a yoga class once.
I do not walk around imaging myself to be intimidating or smart.
Yeah, I think Michael has had to deal with that label of being Michael Caine for a long time.
I don't know that you're able to measure your aggregate wisdom as you go through life. I can't say that I ever feel that I'm sitting on top of a growing mound of wisdom.
The measure of a conversation is how much mutual recognition there is in it; how much shared there is in it. If you're talking about what's in your own head, or without thought to what people looking and listening will feel, you might as well be in a room talking to yourself.
The East is very mysterious to Westerners. Even post-Cold War, it's still an unknown entity.
I'm not drunk onstage, although I've done that a couple of times when I was younger. It's partly just the way I talk - I talk like somebody in a rocking chair. I'm your 150-year-old grandmother.
There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.
A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.
If you're a comic, you don't have a rehearsal room, you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything.
I would never really analyse what I do. I leave that to other people - I'm not a critic. I just want to get on with whatever I have in hand, you know? Just try to make the best job of the available material.
I'm organised in some ways, but not in others.
Lots of comics try stuff out all year round, which is very sensible - I don't.
I really can't describe what my stand-up is like - people see it and they say it's like that, or it's like this, and that's really up to them, that's fine, but I don't sit around all day analysing it. I just try and enjoy a show and interest myself because if I don't do that then I won't interest anybody else.
I'm just a guy who happens to work in public from time to time. I've built a reputation as an established comic, not as a celebrity - a celebrity is someone who is famous but doesn't do anything.
I'm just trying to understand what's around me as much as anyone else is, really. To draw a bead on a moving target.