With a diplomat father, for whom foreign postings were a fact of life, my siblings and I were expected to attend boarding schools in Britain.

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.

Invest in yourself so others can invest in you.

Fate determines a man's beginning. The man, by choice, determines his end.

I am always a competitor and my wife and son have never seen me wrestle.

We worship money instead of honour.

You've got to be willing to lose everything to gain yourself.

Unfortunately it is the weak who destroy the strong.

Scott Tixier is an exciting young jazz violinist and is making an international name for himself. I heard him in France and was immediately struck by his individuality and his sound.

I don't have a lot of time to surf the net and see what everyone's wearing.

Everyone knows [George W. Bush] has no clue, but no one there has the courage to say it. I mean, good gawd, the man is as he always has been: barely adequate.

Let every student enter the school with this advice. No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self education.