It is education that will arm us with the tools that will enable us to succeed and put a stop to the rising rates of preventable death.

Lidia Bastianich sorry but kind of boring. I mean I love Lidia but you can fall asleep watching her. And Mario Batali? I love Mario to death... but he's not romantic or sensual. Those are the things I bring to the table.

I'm very comfortable with the nature of life and death and that we come to an end. What's most difficult to imagine is that those dreams and early yearnings and desires of childhood and adolescence will also disappear. But who knows? Maybe you become part of the eternal whatever.

You can cry about death and very properly so your own as well as anybody else's. But it's inevitable so you'd better grapple with it and cope and be aware that not only is it inevitable but it has always been inevitable if you see what I mean.

Death is inevitable but Life - that's the tricky bit where things happen.

Property is unstable and youth perishes in a moment. Life itself is held in the grinning fangs of Death Yet men delay to obtain release from the world. Alas the conduct of mankind is surprising.

I mean in the South African case many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community people who went to church on Sunday every Sunday.

Humanity should question itself once more about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war on whose stage of death and pain only remain standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior.

I think feminism's a bit misinterpreted. It was about casting off all gender roles. There's nothing wrong with a man holding a door open for a girl. But we sort of threw away all the rules so everybody's confused. And dating becomes a sloppy uncomfortable unpleasant thing.

The people on my mum's side of the family are atheist intellectuals who are ueber-proper. My dad's side of the family are missionaries who are more comfortable sitting around in sweatpants than they are in a five-star restaurant. But those two influences converged in my life.

We sat together as a family for dinner at night. And my mother had a job. My dad had a job. But there was always a meal on the table at 6:00 you know.

My dad was a football player - a soccer player - for Manchester United and I loved playing football but I also happened to be the guy in class who was pretty good at sight reading. My teacher gave me scripts and I was very comfortable.

My parents are very hard working people who did everything they could for their children. I have two brothers and they worked dog hard to give us an education and provide us with the most comfortable life possible. My dad provided for his family daily. So yes that is definitely in my DNA.

My memories are of my dad taking me to football on Saturday mornings and my mum taking me swimming. Those are the things I remember from my childhood not sitting around the table debating capitalism and the profit squeeze.

As a father now I wouldn't do what my dad did because it left me feeling emotionally unstable as a kid. But he didn't do the things he did out of selfishness or malice.

My dad and my uncles owned a bar outside of Cincinnati. I worked there growing up mopping floors waiting tables.

My dad would give me $10 which is a lot of money when you're 9 to sing at church on tables at restaurants at family functions just about anywhere.

I wanted to be a skinny little ballerina but I was a voluptuous little Italian girl whose dad had meatballs on the table every night.

Employee fathers need to step up to the plate and put their family needs on the table.

I'm more comfortable with whatever's wrong with me than my father was whenever he felt he failed or didn't measure up to the standard he set.

Greatness in the last analysis is largely bravery - courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards and respectable ways of doing things.

I think what I would say to my younger self and probably to younger just starting-out writers is that a lot of times you're just afraid to put yourself out there and it's uncomfortable because it's working up the courage to do something to push yourself to do those things.

We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow and courage from the jay who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit.