I am hungry for ratings, because it's a job review, a daily job review. But I try not to be a slave to them.

Prudential's downgrade is extremely rare. In the last five months, despite the market downturn, ratings have been fairly optimistic. This is very rare, especially for a company as big and as popular as J.P. Morgan Chase. It's also a tricky scenario in which J.P. Morgan also covers Prudential.

We wanted to prove that the triangle is the strongest geometric figure.

I respect the challenge of creating something of quality within the very tight confines set by commercial TV, ... That's an appealing idea, meeting that kind of a challenge. To draw a very long bow, it's the same sort of challenge John Donne would have faced when sitting down to write a sonnet. In one way it's so limiting, but in another way it brings out the best of your creative impulses.

I was over-ruled by the judge,

I've found the last couple of years exciting and rewarding but also the most difficult of my life. If you are the product and your life is spent in self-examination, you devour praise and criticism 24 hours a day and you forget the thing that drives the world is outside of you. I don't know any other business so shrouded in Schadenfreude. The knives are always out, it just depends which way they're pointed.