Growing up as a kid my father was British and a soccer player. His idol was a guy that passed the ball a lot, Stanley Matthews. Our family thought if you could be unselfish your teammates would always like you.
But when you lose a family member or something tragic happens, that stays with you forever. You never get over it. Knowing that you have to deal with that for the rest of your life... Football is important, but not as important as you once thought it...
My family were really hard-working, blue-collar people, and I didn't know the idea or concept of working and having fun. I thought you just worked and made money to support your family.
This dapper little mouse that wore such cute clothes and said such interesting things, yeah. I thought it was a great idea to have a mouse like that in your family, so now I get to see what it was like.
I had planned to spend my 40s continuing my public service and starting a family. I thought that by fighting for the people I cared about and loving those close to me, I could leave the world a better place.
The Lord did not bless us with any children of our own, so we gathered up little waifs whom we thought would be neglected and would not be cared for unless we brought them into our family.
Even my family laughed at me because they thought this young guy who's always stuttering in front of other people should be in front of 100 musicians and talk to them and leading them.
For a while, I thought the great disappointment of my life was that I don't have a family of my own. Then it dawned on me: That's not what I think; that's what married people think.
Indeed, I was so afraid to dishonour my friends and family by my indiscreet actions, that I rather chose to be accounted a fool, than to be thought rude or wanton.
I always thought my family was so bizarre, so when people started coming up to me and saying, 'My family was exactly like yours,' I was completely knocked out.
I thought if my son was now eighteen years old and he was tempted to join the fight and take the burden of protecting his family - because it's always tempting especially for young men - what would I do as a mother to stop him?
I don't rehearse on either of my shows, 'Family Feud' or my talk show. I never rehearse with the guests. I don't want to have any preconceived thoughts, notions, because that kills my creativity as a host and as a stand up.
My dad had this philosophy that if you tell children they're beautiful and wonderful then they believe it, and they will be. So I never thought I was unattractive. But I was never one of the girls at school who had lots of boyfriends.
Let me tell you something - being thought of as a beautiful woman has spared me nothing in life. No heartache, no trouble. Love has been difficult. Beauty is essentially meaningless and it is always transitory.
Much of the stress and emptiness that haunt us can be traced back to our lack of attention to beauty. Internally, the mind becomes coarse and dull if it remains unvisited by images and thoughts that hold the radiance of beauty.
I think that I was slightly naive. I thought that if I showed people the beauty of the Arctic and the beauty of the polar bears that they would care so much that they would stand up and try to make a change.
I think, when I was younger, I believed in - and yearned for - conventional beauty. I thought there was a spectrum from ugly to beautiful, and that you could objectively plot everyone you saw along it.
They thought that I did conceive there was a difference between them and Mr. Cotton... I might say they might preach a covenant of works as did the apostles, but to preach a covenant of works and to be under a covenant of works is another business.
When I was very young, I thought the theatre was a place where higher beings went about their celestial business, as if they knew nothing of ordinary life and its political mysteries.
When I was 18, and when I entered my family business, I soon realised that it wasn't as easy as I thought. I had to deal with people of my father's generation. Building trust was key to doing business.
I never thought I would be in a position like this, where my words and experiences are now inspiring others to follow suit. It's challenging at times, but I can only look forward to the future of business and philanthropy.
