At a pub in Rotherham. I was a really bad waitress and I ended up being demoted to chopping the potatoes and I even got fired from that.

When I was younger, I appeared in the Halifax adverts that featured a cake or a bridge made of hundreds of people. You stood there for three days and were not even really seen.

Maybe That’s Your Problem, a musical about premature ejaculation. It closed after only 18 performances.

I worked for a company that stripped an office, including the furniture, over one weekend – so I worked for 48 hours straight.

I am from a family of artists. Here I am making a living in the arts, and it has not been a rebellion. It’s as though I had taken over the family Esso station. My ancestors were all in the arts, so I’m simply making my living in the customary family way.

What makes life worth living are the saints I meet-they can be long-time friends or someone I meet on a street. They find a way to behave decently in an indecent society.

No. Well, I don’t know. It’s biochemical to be redistributed, certainly.

I think it would be the moment where I was doing everything right, where I was beyond criticism. It was back in World War II. It was snowing, but everything was black. The trucks were rolling in. I was surrounded by my buddies. And my rifle was between my knees, my helmet on my head. I was ready for anything. And I was right where I belonged. That would be the moment. It would have to be the moment.

What makes life worth living are the saints I meet-they can be long-time friends or someone I meet on a street. They find a way to behave decently in an indecent society.

I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.