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.

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.

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.

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.

The event of history is hidden in time.

Calligraphy is an art form that uses ink and a brush to express the very souls of words on paper.

Music is truly love itself, the purest, most ethereal language of the emotions, embodying all their changing colors in every variety of shading and nuance.

Death--some form of termination--is the universal ending of all living things; but only man, by virtue of his verbally reportable introspective life, can conceptualize his own cessation.

What's [the Beatles'] I Am the Walrus all about?

Every life comes with a story ... and a possibility for a great adventure.

Rational thoughts never drive people's creativity the way emotions do.

Erroneous assumptions can be disastrous.

As o'er the stormy sea of human Life We sail, until our anchor'd spirits rest In the far haven of Eternity.

[Donald] Trump's establishing his bona fides on military preparedness. No histrionics, just the facts.