When I want comfort food I buy Maltesers. I like all chocolates but especially those. You can eat them and because they're so light you can convince yourself that they are not actually that fattening.

People see you onstage and the glamorous side but they don't see you traveling 600 miles a night eating truck stop food and spending by yourself staring at walls.

Instead of going out to dinner buy good food. Cooking at home shows such affection. In a bad economy it's more important to make yourself feel good.

I tell my students it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see who's very far away who's a different color who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

When you rise in the morning give thanks for the light for your life for your strength. Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks the fault lies in yourself.

If I don't feel confident about my body I'm not going to sit at home and feel sorry for myself and not do something about it. It's all about taking action and not being lazy. So you do the work whether it's fitness or whatever. It's about getting up motivating yourself and just doing it.

You want to put out a TV show? If you have the money to do it on your own by yourself and you have a TV network you can do it by yourself. But the nature of the beast is art needs finance. That's how this industry works. So until the Internet becomes our source of entertainment - and watch it I believe it will - this is how things go.

'Truth Will Set U Free' is about honesty. My philosophic belief that ultimately being true to yourself is liberating with every individual's inalienable right to be who they are without fear or recrimination.

If you believe in yourself if you are without fear you will also be tolerant non-aggressive and find love.

For me it's important to be in balance. To not let fear get in the way of things to not worry so much about protecting yourself all the time.

You have to be careful not to let your fear stop you doing things. It's very exciting to test yourself.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.

Expose yourself to your deepest fear after that fear has no power and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.

Well yeah. At a certain point you've got to be really honest with yourself. Like 'Why am I doing this? What are my motivations?' Like if you get into it because you want to be famous? Then you've got a long row to hoe. But if you really feel like it's a labour of love and it's something you're actually legitimately good at then it's not that hard to keep plugging away.

I got very famous for a minute and then it just all went away you know? And for the last 20 years - you've got to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and then go on your merry way and start again in a sense and that's what I've been doing.

I think being famous is more of a hindrance a constraint than just letting yourself be free.

I think that as soon as you think of yourself as a famous person or anything like that you're objectifying yourself in some weird way.

I know I have this level of celebrity of fame international national whatever you want to call it but it's a pretty surreal thing to think sometimes that you're in the middle of another famous person's life and you think to yourself 'How the hell did I get famous? What is this some weird club that we're in?'

I could have been a dental hygienist with nothing bad ever appearing in print about me but that's not how I've chosen to lead my life. I knew that you put yourself under a microscope the more famous you become.

There's more pressure to be famous for being yourself than if you're being a character.

There's a sort of sibling moratorium when you're establishing yourself as an adult. So much of your energy has to be focused on other things like work and kids. But when people become more settled siblings tend to regroup because now you're building a new extended family.

If you wish to spare yourself and your venerable family give heed to my advice with the ear of intelligence. If you do not you will see what God has willed.

I think that's become passe but if you can surround yourself with a kind of monument to yourself and your family - a statement - and you can afford it then that's a noble project.