Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

It’s very strange to go to cities like London and New York. People walk so quickly, they seem to be in a hurry all the time. And you don’t say ‚Hi‘ to everyone you meet, and you don’t smile to everyone you meet, because there’s just so many. Which is also very strange.

I often look ridiculous in Japan. There’s really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.

Income inequity has to be addressed.

Here in England, everyone’s a pop star, innit, whereas in America they believe in the term artist.

Black people in America, people from the struggle, immigrants, it’s no generational wealth that we are attached to, so we are tasked to create – in one generation – closing the gap. That’s why we so Doomsday about getting to the check: ‚cause it’s life or death for real.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

It’s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important… and to feel that you’re being published by people who really don’t get it and/or don’t really care.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

Unfortunately, in a recession, the people who suffer the most aren’t the rich, but the wanna-be rich and the poor.

Both times I was in India, I could not get people to listen to each other. I had to literally tell people to listen to each other and tell them that they can’t get creative and find alternate solutions if they don’t listen to each other. There’s a lot of arguing and justifying.

The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.

The Americans at heart are a pure and noble people; things to them are in black and white. It’s either ‚rawk‘ or it’s not. We Brits putter around in the grey area.

If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.

There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.

I don’t know why they gave me a knighthood – though it’s very nice of them – but I only ever use the title in the U.S. The Americans insist on it and get offended if I don’t.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

The Welsh people have a talent for acting that one does not find in the English. The English lack heart.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

No intelligent black man or black woman in his or her right black mind wants white boys and white girls coming to their homes to marry their black sons and daughters.

We sold ‚Seinfeld‘ all over the world but it was a very specific kind of show. In some countries it went down really well, in others they hated it.

I’m married to an Italian woman, and I used to love cooking Italian at home, because it’s one-pot cooking. But my wife does not approve of my Italian cooking.

Europeans are much more serious than we are in America because they think that a good place to discuss intellectual matters is a beer party.

I think it’s an Irish thing. We don’t really care. We say it as we mean it, and you have to deal with it. The truth is the truth.

Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that, in Europe, we’re probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

You can only choose between rich and poor. The middle class is gone.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.