It alarms me to think of all that I have read and how little of it has stayed with me.
I never thought I'd end up living in Los Angeles while my children grew up in Britain, but here I am, and we are all making the best of it.
The strange thing - and this is one of the advantages of being incredibly shallow and superficial - is that wherever I am, that's sort of home.
The first big stars, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, you know, these were gigantic stars. I even wonder sometimes whether all music actually comes from women, whether the first glimmering of music is a mother soothing a baby.
Even the greatest poets, I think, cannot quite get to the places that music can get to in the human - I was gonna say mind, but it's actually the entire body. It somehow seems to infuse the entire body.
Muddy Waters, I suppose, was my first great hero. You know, every boy wants to be a guitar player, and Muddy Waters was just the king. He was the King Bee. He was it.
I have always stuck up for Western medicine. You can chew all the celery you want, but without antibiotics, three quarters of us would not be here.
The financing of all TV shows is dictated by finding an audience between 18 and 49. I have now passed beyond 49, so probably, I am no longer a desirable commodity for TV. And I am at peace with that; that's fine.
In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.
Girls are complicated. The instruction manual that comes with girls is 800 pages, with chapters 14, 19, 26 and 32 missing, and it's badly translated, hard to figure out.
They're very harsh people, the British: hard to impress, very tough on each other, but I rather like that. It's not that the British are more honest - you're just under no illusion with them.
It doesn't rain at all in California. Once a month, a man drives through spraying Evian.
Acting is largely about putting on masks, and music is about removing them.
I wouldn't be able to act like Al Pacino or play the piano like Dr. John, But I could probably act better than Dr. John and play the piano better than Al Pacino.
The glory of American television is Dennis Franz.
I've never been clever with money. I will buy anything at the top of the market.
I really do believe the camera steals the soul. But that may be because I'm worried about my soul. I don't have much of a soul to begin with; I can't afford to lose much.
Piano was - well, all musical instruments were taught in this very rigid, formal, classical method when I was young.
When the ship goes down, the waves very quickly roll over the top of it, and attention shifts elsewhere. It's just the natural order of things in TV - in life - and is as it should be.
One great benefit of not being on TV every week is that people will be a lot less interested in what I have in my supermarket basket. I could even un-tint my car windows - or at least opt for a lighter shade.
I do actually like Los Angeles. Partly because I was told I wouldn't.
You hope that your teenage self would like and forgive your 50-year-old self.
Believe it or not, perhaps I don't show it much, or well, but I think I like people.
I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.
I have resolved to pick one novel and just read it over and over again for the rest of my life, because I cannot remember anything anymore.
To be a head boy, you have to be very clever, you have to be a scholar, and I was never a scholar in any shape or form.
Some people are drawn naturally - there are natural guitarists, and there are natural piano players, and I think guitar implies travel, a sort of footloose gypsy existence. You grab your bag and you go to the next town.
I hate menus, I hate choosing food. I just want to be brought. Bring me dinner!
Seems to me that this business, for actors anyway, is not so much about whether or not you do good work. It's about whether or not you get the chance to do good work.
I run six-to-eight miles a day, plus weights and aerobics in the lunch hour. I also lie a lot, which keeps me thin.
