Because I was starting out in my 20's. I wanted to do it on my own. I didn't want to use my dad or have people say I was using him.

I was who I was in high school in accordance with the rules of conduct for a normal person like obeying your mom and dad. Then I got out of high school and moved out of the house and I just started for lack of a better term running free.

Right now it hasn't affected my music other than the fact that I don't have time to write any of it. That's no different from when I first started and I lived at home. I would play the guitar in the afternoon and then my mom or my dad would come home and I'd have to quit.

Well Steve Vai joined my dad's band right around the time when I actually started playing guitar. So he gave me a couple of lessons on fundamentals and gave me some scales and practice things to work on. But I pretty much learned everything by ear.

Keep in my mind my dad didn't become a huge huge mega actor until I was halfway through high school - so right around the time he's going through his big renaissance is right when I'm starting to do my high school revolting.

One day my dad would say 'OK if you want to play tennis I can help you out.' And that's how it started. And I had a goal. I wanted to beat my mom first. And my parents and my brother. And that was the ultimate goal.

My mom was a professional. My dad and mom met each other in a movie called 'New Faces of 1937.' My mom went under the name Thelma Leeds and she did a few movies and she was really a great singer and when she married my dad and started to have a family she sang at parties.

I haven't really decided to be an actor yet! I started doing plays when I was about 15 or 16. I only did it because my dad saw a bunch of pretty girls in a restaurant and he asked them where they came from and they said drama group. He said 'Son that is where you need to go.'

When I was a kid my step dad started this business and would go out and get lost cows and stuff. He was part-time truck driver farmer and cowboy. He taught me how to ride from an early age.

After graduating from flares and platforms in the early 1970s I started drama school wearing a pair of khaki dungarees with one of my Dad's Army shirts accessorised by a cat's basket doubling as a handbag. Very Lady Gaga.

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.

When I started writing I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.

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.

It wasn't like I was self-motivated. My dad started me. It was his dream before it was mine.

We all started snowboarding in the beginning as a family just to be closer together go on trips. It was our soccer but instead of Dad yelling at me from the sideline he is there riding with me and hitting the jumps even before I am hitting them.

A father and two sons run Adelphia. It's a cable company. And they took from that company a billion dollars. A billion. Three people - three people took a billion dollars. What were they gonna do start their own space program? 'Let's send the monkey to Mars Dad!'

I want to be a young dad. By 25 or 26 I want to see myself like married or start looking for a family.

I mean I look at my dad. He was twenty when he started having a family and he was always the coolest dad. He did everything for his kids and he never made us feel like he was pressured. I know that it must be a great feeling to be a guy like that.

The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful often urgent and essentially life-affirming but they are all performances of courage and honesty.

Let me start with Yahoo. As we meet today a Chinese citizen who had the courage to speak his mind on the Internet is in prison because Yahoo chose to share his name and address with the Chinese Government.

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 had every problems starting a big top could have. The tent fell down on the first day. We had problems getting people into the shows. It was only with the courage and arrogance of youth that we survived.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26 which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

A life lesson for me is how do you muster the courage to take on a new risk? Whether it's starting up a business or taking on a new project or expedition. I think the risks that we take are all relative to the risk-taker.