I'm not a great shopper but I do buy a lot of books. I'm the publishers' friend - I buy a hundred books a year and read four.

If you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books.

It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.

The one I remember is going into London, as it was for us in Essex, on New Year's Eve in 1981. There were four of us and we'd had a few lagers on the way. One of my mates threw up in the Tube and then stood up and fell over in it. We thought it was the funniest thing we'd ever seen.

My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.

I read comics and stuff. I buy a lot of comics, a lot of films and boxsets.