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.

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 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.

A writer fills the paper with the pictures of perception, experience, and feeling of real and imaginative lives.

Digital attitude is about adaptability - being experimental and changeable.

Ill paddle board, swim in the ocean, roll in the sand, soak up the sun, eat good food, be with friends and family and go fishing with my dad.

Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.

In France, if you have any sort of talent, you'd better keep it here. And if you're going to go abroad, it had better not be America. The old battle - American versus Frog cinema. It's ridiculous.

There's hardly anywhere in literature where you don't find a triangle.

I got an agent and went up for the part of my first film, Five Gates to Hell.

Think with the whole body.

By a twist of fate rather than anything approaching journalistic enterprise, I did the last major interview with Johnny Carson.