There is so much that is positive, wonderful even, about state schools. At a state school your kids will learn to live alongside and appreciate other kids from many diverse and different cultures.

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.

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.

I don't look to find an educated person in the ranks of university graduates, necessarily. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university.

We crave and fear becoming truly ourselves

A meticulous virtual copy of the human brain would enable basic research on brain cells and circuits or computer-based drug trials.

Today I don't want to live for, I want to live.

I'll always say my prayers...and if God doesn't answer them at once I shall know it's because He's planning something better for me.

I would say whisky or pills. Not both because that can have disastrous consequences.

Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.

To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.

I loved growing up in Canada. It’s a great place to grow up, because - well, at least where I grew up -it’s very multicultural. There’s also good health care and a good education system.

Independent and uninvolved. Must be nice. -Tris