Despotism isn't nearly as bad as it's cracked up to be.

The crushing, pitiful, and frequently just plain risible pathos of an unsuccessful actor/performer's life is well charted.

Both Plockton and the Isle of Muck in north-west Scotland are incredibly beautiful. Sadly, Plockton has been discovered by tourists because it's where they shot Hamish Macbeth.

If one's honest about it, spending time in a car with children is pretty ghastly.

My theory is that one needs to be loved completely, unconditionally, and unfettered by parental disapproval, if one is to get happily through life which, after all, presents its own hurdles.

My mother, father, stepmother and surrogate mother have all died of cancer; my best friend has got terminal cancer and at least five of my other friends have had cancer but survived it.

If there's one thing I know, it's this - everybody thinks somebody else is having a better life.

If you have any power at all from being popular, then you have a duty to help people out.

Does everyone turn into a truculent thirteen-year-old when they go home, or is it just me?

Statistically, if you have ever dieted you are extremely likely not only to regain any weight you lose, but to go on to gain even more. Dieting makes you fat.

Sticking to a diet required me to have a permanently low self-esteem. But happily, I developed other skills beyond a fluctuating weight, eventually building up a different source of self-worth.

No man can stay for forever young, Unless he is a writer.

There has never been a war of Canadian origin nor for a Canadian cause.

For many years it was difficult for me to paint because I didn't feel the informal painting that was then tyrannically dominating painters and art collectors.

But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.

So DeCSS didn't introduce anything new for pirating and had already been available.

And alone and without his nest shall the Eagle fly across the sun.

A man is related to all nature.

I knew I had to keep him to myself, as I'd slowly begun to keep everything. We had secrets now, truths and half-truths, that kept her always at arm's length, behind a closed door, miles away.

All metallics are neutrals. So it is absolutely fine to mix gold and silver; you just want it to look like it has purpose.

Charity is great, but the moment you say it is all, you run the risk of running into materialism.