I play the piano and that's how I learned about music. I then taught myself the guitar, drums, percussion and various other things, such as the bazooka, the mandolin, the Theremin, the alpine horn, the didgeridoo.

The devil's in the detail and sometimes if you're thinking too big, you can miss the detail.

In 1994 I was doing a two-hander with Sean Lock in Edinburgh and there were more people in the cast than the audience. It was pretty grim, quite a chastening experience.

I've always been reasonably upbeat about most things.

I've always been envious of certainty, of people who always seemed to have a plan for their lives.

I hate getting ill, it irritates me so I try to stay reasonably healthy.

I've started doing Bikram yoga. You're in a boiling hot room, bending over pretending to be a locust, you can't do that at the gym.

I used to like beer, but it makes me feel slightly queasy.

I said to my wife that if I had enough money I'd have my arms lengthened. Slightly longer arms would be great.

I don't like labels. I have always fought against that as a stand-up.

There was something about stand-up that music wouldn't give me, which was my love of the spoken word and the mercurial tendency of language to respond to what happens to you.

My grandparents would have big, long arguments that were entertaining and that's where I first noticed, and was thrilled by, political discourse.

It's been Bill for so long people think my name is William, but it's not, it's Mark.

We live in the age of entitlement, as opposed to enlightenment.

If you become famous but haven't actually achieved anything, then your life has no real meaning - unless you're spectacularly shallow.

I'm really grateful for the fact that I have full artistic control over my career. I can choose what film or TV projects I'm interested in doing.

Great music and great artists create their own music and look and are not manufactured.

Some musicians are a bit humourless about their art: they lose sight of the fact that as well as exercising their muse, they're there to entertain.

Now, with the success of musical comedy like the Mighty Boosh, Flight of the Conchords and Bo Burnham, I feel vindicated.

I had this plan that David Byrne was going to come through the West Country one day, think, 'Who's that guy?' and ask me to go on tour with them.

I was always part of the end-of-term review at school. We would mercilessly mock any slight weakness in the teachers.

When you say 'Hello Wembley!' you're not just saying hello to a large shed. You're saying, 'Hello, I'm following all the greats that have played here before.'

I was asked to perform at the Olympics Opening Ceremony. But I was up a tree in Borneo filming a documentary about Alfred Russel Wallace! So it couldn't be done.

When the sun shines in Britain there's no finer place on Earth.

In order to have quality journalism you need to have a good income stream, and no Internet model has produced a way of generating income that would pay for good-quality investigative journalism.

I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.

The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population.

I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.

My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.

When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.

I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.

There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.

Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.

A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.

I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why.

Have you ever seen Glenn Beck in operation? It is the most terrifying thing. It's so bad that you think he's going to announce in a minute that it's all a great con. He makes Sarah Palin look reasonable and steady.

If you go out on the Appalachian Trail, you have to bring so much more equipment - a tent, sleeping bag - but if you go hiking in England, or Europe, generally, towns and villages are near enough together at the end of the day you can always go to a nice little inn and have a hot bath and something to drink.

If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a completely different way. You discover it in a much slower, more majestic sort of way.

Maine is wonderful. It can be very hard. I mean, if you look at the profile maps it doesn't look it, but somehow when you get out there it's really steep and hard.

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.

I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they've left me.

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

I always tell people there's only one trick to writing: You have to write something that people are willing to pay money to read. It doesn't have to be very good, necessarily, but somebody, somewhere, has got to be willing to pay money for it.

I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.