I had to learn how to chop wood actually - I don't think my dad would have let me go chop wood in the backyard growing up.

A large part of my life revolves around my dad. Sometimes I even feel a strong sense of connection something very tangible when I learn something new in the martial arts.

When I was growing up my mother would say 'Your dad may have to learn about being a father because he lost his own and that would have affected him'.

We all have experiences in our lives that change us and we all learn from people like my dad but at the end of the day it's only us. And we're only responsible to make ourselves happy.

My dad was a huge country music fan but he also had a band and he sang. So he'd listen to a lot of music and the songs that he'd learn for the band were more from the male artists. So my earliest country memories were Waylon Jennings Conway Twitty George Jones Johnny Paycheck even.

I think it's easiest to teach by example. My dad didn't tell us to work hard we just saw how hard he worked. I know I have shortcomings - like a short fuse - but I've learned you can't come home from a long day of work and snap at the kids.

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.

Often as a child you see someone with a learning disability or Down's Syndrome and my mum and dad were always very quick to explain exactly what was going on and to be in their own way inclusive and welcoming.

Great dad. Yeah he would ask me for money on birthdays and you know inappropriate times. And I just wrote him off like 'You're not a father.' I just learned you cannot emotionally invest in people who are not attainable.

And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought I'm going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up I'm going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

I never had a speech from my father 'this is what you must do or shouldn't do' but I just learned to be led by example. My father wasn't perfect.

When I was 18 I thought my father was pretty dumb. After a while when I got to be 21 I was amazed to find out how much he'd learned in three years.

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

They put me in a harness like a horse to learn the back somersault. It was weird up there when I put on that harness for the first time. The courage came with practice.

I'm a writer of faith who worries about the intolerance of religion. I look at the past and fear we haven't learned from it. I believe that humanity is capable of evil as well as great acts of courage and goodness. I have hope. Deep down I believe in the human spirit although sometimes that belief is shaken.

I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest not just military service.

The one thing I learned the most about acting is it takes a tremendous amount of courage to go there and stand still. It takes courage and guts to step out of your mind frame and depict something.

I'm still shy - I'm no good at my children's parent-teacher conferences and I'm slowly learning how to ask for what I want. But I now know that I have a reserve of courage to draw upon when I really need it. There's nothing that I'm too scared to have a go at.

TV is so different from the movies. It takes a lot of stamina because you work such long hours. It is really challenging. You are learning the next day's lines while you are shooting today's scenes. I found courage I never realised I had. I hope to do more.

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.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid but he who conquers that fear.

White people couldn't do black music back in the day because they weren't funky or bad enough. They weren't from the ghettoes but hip-hop and R&B changed all of that because white kids want to be down with it. They wanted to learn it so they studied the culture. It's kind of a cool thing because we shouldn't be so separate.

The military is a very cool world to write about. I went down to Ft. Benning Ga. for military training and I learned a lot about soldiers and officers and why they joined up and what their life has been like.

Roy Schneider was cool. I learned quite a bit from him.