We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.
Everything I do has the tinge of the finite, of my own demise. At some point you either accept death or you just keep pushing it back as you get older and older. I've accepted it.
For my own health, I thought it was better to eat a plant based diet. I'm going to be 60 soon and I have boundless energy and I feel really good, so I'm all for it.
Having achieved my own dreams, I want to give to kids who are less fortunate, who struggle with everyday obstacles. I want to give them something positive in their lives: support.
What people tell me they take away from my books is that they can shape their lives, they can achieve their own dreams. And certainly that's what I want them to take away.
I'm not cynical about marriage or romance. I enjoyed being married. And although being single was fun for a while, there was always the risk of dating someone who'd owned a lunch box with my picture on it.
My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.
In my own life, I believe it was an early education in poetical metaphor that helped me to grapple with and make sense of all the difficult and traumatic things that were to come.
Learning about all those different things psychologically - about grief and my own addictions and problems and stuff like that, and really getting an education on it, I think it was part of the process of it, learning about it and trying to lick it.
Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.
Maybe it's just my own chronic morbidity and melancholia, but I really do think about it a great deal and quite often in the small hours of the night when, it is said, the greatest numbers of people die.
I know I have great inner strength; I always have. I can blank things out, cut people out, and I know that I can go and live in a cave on my own if necessary.
Skiing in Whistler was great fun. It's an extreme environment that's very different to my own and I had never skied before, so I had to learn to take on the elements quite bravely. It was nice to try something new.
I certainly feel my career was a great career because it inspired so many many people, literally hundreds of people to follow a new kind of life and to realize that they could make out and advance their own professional and private and social lives.
I'm great at telling stories with the kids. I do all my different accents. We make our own stories up all the time, the four of us, me and Hannah and the kids.
There has to be a balance between power and vulnerability. That's something I feel I have in my own life, something I struggle with and - on a good day - like about myself.
That was just my own personal program: I didn't want to get too high over the good moments because I didn't want to be saddened and depressed when things didn't go as I had planned.
It was a very idyllic childhood, surrounded by utterly beautiful landscapes that I got very, very bored of when I hit my teens. But being on your own a lot and being bored is good for your imagination. It makes it stretch.
Find a good teacher, as I found for my sons. I feel the worst thing you can do is to try and teach your own children yourself, because there is a natural rebellion that occurs.
When I first started playing team sports, I was a little too sweet for my own good. I'd be in tears because I wasn't doing well. But the healthy competition really toughened me up.
The puppet characters were combinations of people I had known and to some degree aspects of my own personality. Weird was based on someone I knew in Chicago. Dirty Dragon was based on a good friend I had in Indianapolis.
