So as an amateur Olympic competitor I loved criticism, because it made me better. But now as a professional I don't really know how to channel it or where to take it, so I don't take it quite as well.
To be honest, I don't really care about any pope. It's not something I think about much, to be quite honest with you.
Obviously given good health, and a continuing audience and a record company that allows me to do music. So given those things yes, I'm introducing some new music that people haven't really heard me do in quite this fashion.
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory. I like the atmospheres that result if episodes are narrated through the haze of memory.
I am quite positive about business in India, and 2014 was a strong year here. We announced deals with Vodafone, Tata, Bharti.
I think it's almost impossible for any expert to predict for the rapid changes we see in the Middle East. They are rapid and they will continue for quite a while.
I'm really quite conscious of clothes and the way they fit and don't regret wearing anything. Not even the five-inch stack heels I wore with three-button high-waisters at comprehensive school. Regret is for wimps.
The vast literature concerning whistleblowers shows that, far from weird extremists, they are really quite ordinary people: male and female, young and old, junior and senior, no more nerdy or obsessive than most hard workers.
If I test the car for a year I can be quite competitive the next season.
I feel that marrying younger and being quite a young dad helped me with the stability of my career.
It is one of the little known facts about modern Scottish politics that it is not quite as cut-throat as people think it is.
Their elegant shape, showy colours, and slow, sailing mode of flight, make them very attractive objects, and their numbers are so great that they form quite a feature in the physiognomy of the forest, compensating for the scarcity of flowers.
Acting and making music are quite complementary. Acting relies on someone else's writing and direction; writing music or lyrics doesn't. But they are both creative and personal in completely different ways.
When I brought my medical school friends home, Dad used to tell us that we didn't know anything about the world. He started giving me impromptu quizzes about history and current events. I quite liked that.
I'm quite surprised that nobody has asked me to do my own line of tweezers. I totally would love to do that. Or, like, mascara. Cara's Mascara!
Comedy comes from tragedy, and being Iranian in America from 1979 on had been quite tragic. In stand-up comedy, I was able to take the reality and exaggerate it.
Some day, when I'm done triggering special snow flakes on campus, when I'm tired of all this, I might quite like a little Milo.
In the developing world, people often use quite basic technology. Many of the most imaginative schemes are using what we'd count as old tech.
I'm quite a curious person. I don't mind being the one who doesn't know things, a role I often play in QI.
A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.
Intuition makes much of it; I mean by this the faculty of seeing a connection between things that in appearance are completely different; it does not fail to lead us astray quite often.
I don't quite have the luxury of cherry-picking - I have to see what comes my way. But I have always been picky.
Young adults love to play games and they're thirsty for social interaction, but a lot of bar and restaurant experiences are quite unsatisfactory on the social level. What young people need is a place that has the feel of an unhosted party where they find themselves interacting with like-minded strangers.
When you conceive the scene, you go, 'That is scary, right?' When you shoot it, a lot of times you're not quite sure. Hopefully what you can shoot is what your conception is.
I don't sing operatically, and I sing very intimately, but I still do the scales, and I think in terms of intonation and making sure that I'm hitting the notes right on the head... and having it appear quite effortless.
Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right, you can fix it.
My father had to flee from what is today Pakistan when he was a child, and he became a manager at IBM, and any item of consumption he would acquire was a direct measurement of his success in life. But that same equation wasn't going to work for me - I was quite clear about that in my early teens.
From singing to acting to songwriting to mom to fashion designer! It's been quite an evolution.
I was quite creative at school, and was also interested in fashion, but I was shy - I'm still not the loudest of people, believe it or not.
Clearly I'm able to read emotions. But I do feel... What is it? Awkwardness. I'm not a slick dude. That's what it comes down to. The nakedness, the guilelessness... that's quite real.
I was very, very shy in public and school, and quite loud and brash at home.
Then my extended family, there are preachers and evangelists, former priests. So I have quite a bit of history with Church, religion and spirituality.
In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.
Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.
Although when Christianity appeared the total population of the planet was only a fraction of that of the twentieth century, most of the earth's surface was quite outside the Mediterranean world, Persia, India, and China.
I never publicise in advance what I'm going to be singing because I never quite know until I start. I often change my mind halfway through. I sometimes throw in stuff about politics or Shakespeare or do songs in Yiddish.
