Anytime you cast a movie and you need someone famous in the lead part you're a prisoner of whoever happens to be famous in the six-month window in which you're trying to get a film financed.

Well I would say that we're regular people first of all and we're normal and it's obvious by some of the things that have happened just because our name is famous we're not immune to tragedy.

I have a profound empathy for people who are in the public eye whether they manifest it themselves or whether it happened by accident - it doesn't matter to me. I think there's a great misunderstanding of what it is to be famous.

You have no idea how humiliating it was as a boy to suddenly have all your clothes your toys snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed I felt dirty.

The sad events that occur in my life are the sad events that happen to everybody with losing friends and family but that is a natural occurrence as natural as being born.

As a novelist I mined my history my family and my memory but in a very specific way. Writing fiction I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

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 was.

I think the American Dream says that anything can happen if you work hard enough at it and are persistent and have some ability. The sky is the limit to what you can build and what can happen to you and your family.

Everything happens for a reason. I'm used to it I prepare for it. Like I say at the end of the day those in charge of their own destiny are going to do what's right for them and their family.

I have faith in the justice system and what will happen will happen. I'm just trying to do the right thing.

So many of my friends are still trying to get record deals and I've had one for 10 years now where my only goal is to make the best music I can make. I've been very lucky. I have great faith that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be and whatever happens is going to be absolutely right for me.

You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical it's because I really don't know how it works but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read in order to find out what happens next.

When you put your total faith in God no matter what happens to a person who's a true believer if you die you know you're going to heaven to be with God.

I still have a belief and a faith that some great things are still going to happen in my career. If I didn't believe that it makes no sense for me to be out there and on top of that I know this is a period of time that God wants me to persevere through.

I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don't think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism Islam or other faiths.

With engineering I view this year's failure as next year's opportunity to try it again. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly.

This attempt to isolate cell constituents might have been a failure if they had been destroyed by the relative brutality of the technique employed. But this did not happen.