In this New York Times Magazine piece, Ricky Gervais (star of the television show The Office in Britain) explains what I think is a life philosophy:

“I know I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said of the Golden Globes. “If I had done something wrong, it’d have been terrible. If I have to go, ‘They’re right,’ that’s a terrible feeling.” He said the only reliable metric for success was his own satisfaction with his performance. “The only thing that matters is, did it turn out like I wanted it?”

If you’re chasing after positive reviews, demographic trends or a lucrative box office, Gervais said, “you’ve already failed.” But, he added, “if your only ambition is to get something off your chest and render it exactly as you wanted it, then you’re bulletproof.”

Another tidbit comes from how Ricky Gervais uses his Twitter account:

Since the summer, Gervais had become more active on a dormant Twitter account he set up in 2009, and upset a swath of his million or so followers with his frequent use of the word “mong,” a shortened form of the word “mongoloid.” Gervais argued that the word was also drug slang, as in “monged out,” and his point, he said, “was that words don’t have hatred built in — it’s how you use them, it’s about intent.” In any case, he said: “You can’t really explore it on Twitter because you only get the reaction. You don’t get the discussion.” A few days later, he got into an electronic slapfest with a Twitter user named @GodsWordIsLaw, who had called him a “vile creature” and accused him of tweeting “anti-Christian bigotry all day long.”