I found that not having a public profile was not hurting the work, and it freed me up to be the satirist I wanted to be.
Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions - Why am I doing it, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead.
Stock is everything in cooking, at least in French cooking. Without it, nothing can be done. If one's stock is good, what remains of the work is easy; if, on the other hand, it is bad or merely mediocre, it is quite hopeless to expect anything approaching a satisfactory result.
I have always been fascinated by the way things work and how they came to take the form that they did. Writing about these things satisfies my curiosity about the made world while at the same time giving me an opportunity to design a new explanation for the processes that shape it.
I have a full and satisfying life. My work and my family are very important to me.
I adore my family; they are my joy. However, I am committed to my work. If, on a Saturday morning when I was ostensibly going to be with the children, and something arose at RADA or at UNICEF or at the orphanage or whatever, I would allow the other pressures to take precedent.
It's the little things you remember. My mam, Sue, would take me to training in a taxi when I was a kid if Dad, who is a builder, had to work on a Saturday morning. You look back at the stuff like that and realise the sacrifices were all worth it.
I have found that people who really want to work at 'Saturday Night Live' and pursue it get pretty close. You have to be funny - but everyone who works there, it was their dream to work there. So it's kind of nice in that way - there's a lot of people who say, 'I just always wanted to do this, and now I'm doing it.'
Most of the time you're too busy to think about it. But every now and then you say, 'I work at 'Saturday Night Live,' and that is so cool.
I think people overplay the 'Saturday Night Live' schedule. I mean, yeah, it can be some late hours. But the late hours are usually only one or two nights out of the week. You might have a crazy six-day week, but you'll work three weeks, and then you get a week off work. I'd take most jobs if it was hard work and then I got a week off.
I skate six days a week, three sessions a day, and I go to the gym three times a week. I lift weights, do some ab work and whatever my trainer tells me to do. I take Saturdays off.
I normally work out six days a week. I'll do Pilates on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and I'll do cardio on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
It was actually quite easy to work with Uggie, because he's a really well trained dog. Very talented. I just had to follow him a little bit, improvise a little bit. Sometimes he'd follow me. Especially because of the sausages I had in my pocket.
I think work really is a life saver, because it carries you forward, which is good.
I'm happiest at home hanging out with the kids... Having a family has been my saving grace because I don't work back to back on anything or I'd drive myself to an early grave with guilt and worry for my family, whom I'd never see.
People think my work is therapeutic. I don't see it that way. It's not like I'm saving money from a weekly therapy visit by writing down my life.
Most of us were probably less than immaculately honest as teenagers; it's practically encoded into adolescence that you savor your secrets, dress in disguise, carve out some space for experiments and accidents and all the combustible lab work of becoming who you are.
I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over.
If haters or whatever want to find you - I mean, some of them are so tenacious. You want to hire them to work for you. They're very, very savvy in terms of how they find you and get to you.
The origin of all revolutions and corruption, and the spur and source of all base morals are just two sayings: The First Saying: 'So long as I'm full, what is it to me if others die of hunger?' The Second Saying: 'You suffer hardship so that I can live in ease; you work so that I can eat.'
