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

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.

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

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.

Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.

Chronic pain or other challenges are invitations; gifts that challenge us to learn how to manage the mind.

The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.

Men know so little about us women. We've a weakness, it is true, for those who charm us, but we always come back to those who love us.

There are religions and social and moral awareness in any society that gets passed immediately. Those human truths. All cultures address them.

I warn't never meant to be a lady, I know that now. I got streaks of wildness in me that trip me up every time, and just like streaks in clothes, there's some dirt that just won't wash out.

Not a lot of people have jobs that they're really comfortable with, but I'm one of those people. I feel like I'm the luckiest girl on earth, and that's such a lovely feeling.

Officers conditioned to conformity in peacetime cannot be expected to behave boldly and flexibly in combat.

You dropped this," he said, totally poker-faced.

If I was able to have the game I have and shoot 80% from the line, I'd probably be an arrogant person rather than a humble one. Everything happens for a reason.