I had the opportunity to go to law school and my dad who was an accountant couldn't believe I wanted to walk away from that and start cooking.

In a school where everyone is famous or rich or whatever you have a culture 'What does your dad do?' 'What does your mom do?'

The founder of the Mona Foundation actually knew my dad for years and the more I learned about it the more I realized I really found the perfect charity. It sponsors schools and educational initiatives all over the planet.

Within our culture every school has a swimming pool. We lived on the coast. People swam in the surf. It's a very sporty nation and at that particular time anyone who had an artistic bent was very much an outsider. So if you liked reading or ideas or playing the piano then your dad viewed you as a sissy basically.

I met Gemma my wife when she was 12. She had a schoolgirl crush on me and her dad had arranged for her to meet me. Later she started coming to my concerts but I only got to know her well after her mother died. I rang to see how she was and that's how it started.

I say this as a young dad seeing children going into primary school: I don't think we should underestimate the formative effect on a child of those first years in primary school.

My mom and dad met at Anaheim High School. After they got married all they wanted to do was have four children and they did.

My dad was dean of fine arts at the university. I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was using the university as a playground.

My dad was a labourer and my mum had exactly the same job as Noel Gallagher's mum - she was a dinner lady at our local school. Everyone comes over from Ireland and they get the same jobs.

My mother taught public school went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.

My humanitarian work evolved from being with my family. My mom my dad they really set a great example for giving back. My mom was a nurse my dad was a school teacher. But my mom did a lot of things for geriatrics and elderly people. She would do home visits for free.

When I was in nursery school the teachers asked me y'know 'What does your dad do for a living?' So I said 'He helps women get pregnant!' They called my mom and they were like 'What exactly does your husband do?'

My dad always used to tell me that if they challenge you to an after-school fight tell them you won't wait-you can kick their ass right now.

One afternoon when I was 9 my dad told me I'd be skipping school the next day. Then we drove 12 hours from Melbourne to Sydney for the Centenary Test a once-in-a-lifetime commemorative cricket match. It was great fun - especially for a kid who was a massive sports fan.

Dad kept us out of school but school comes and goes. Family is forever.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

When I was in school I read a lot of comic books and pretend I was in them and kids would tease me and call me names. But now I do the same things and people say that I'm artistic and cool and I'm doing the exact same thing I did in high school.

I hated the idea of a high school sweetheart. Growing up oh my God it just made me sick. I wanted to have a range of cool boyfriends. I wanted to travel around and date these interesting men. Then it just happened. You fall in love.

You can think of Hollywood as high school. TV actors are freshmen comedy actors are maybe juniors and dramatic actors - they're the cool seniors.

I remember in high school trying to get home from water-polo practice in time so I could see Happy Days on television when it first came on because I was so blown away by it. It was just such a cool thing.

I wasn't some weird loner in school but I definitely wasn't invited to any of the cool parties.

When I was in high school my friends and I would drive out into the country to abandoned houses and structures... haha... to ghost hunt. We would scare each other so bad! We would sometimes camp out by the abandoned buildings just to scare ourselves! Such good times. The adrenaline of real fear is so cool!

I went to engineering school which I thought was what I wanted to do for about two weeks. We had an orientation class and we met this guy where he worked and stuff and it was cool but I was like 'There is no way this is going to be my life.'

I used to skip out of high school and go flying. It was just one of those things I thought it was kind of a cool thing to do. I never thought about doing that as a profession but I started checking things out and I found out there was a flight school down in Daytona Beach called Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.