I was born William. My father was William. I came from a big family, I hated being called Billy. Willem's a nickname; it's a Dutch name, very common in the Netherlands.

My education as a film composer, you can't not - if you like the orchestra like I do, if you are a symphonist like I am - you can't not listen to John Williams' work.

On June 3, 2015, in keeping with a long tradition, I visited my home club in the Pepper Pike suburb of Cleveland, known simply as The Country Club. It's an old William Flynn design and perhaps the most underrated course in America. It's elegant, challenging and filled with old-world charm.

I live in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, so I just like to wander around. Williamsburg's such a cool little neighborhood community spot.

I was standing on the shoulders of other science fiction writers like William Gibson, who had written 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter before home computers even really existed, and Neal Stephenson who wrote 'Snow Crash' in the early '90s and imagined an online virtual world before the birth of the modern Internet.

I love the royal family. I even got up in the middle of the night to watch Kate and William's wedding. And I never miss the Queen's speech on Christmas Day. I feel it's my duty as an English-born woman to watch.

'A Tuna Christmas' is the second in a series of plays created by Joe Sears and Jaston Williams featuring the fictional town of Greater Tuna, the third-smallest town in Texas. What makes these plays so hysterically funny is the accurate portrayal of small-town life in the Lone Star State.

My dad's American, and my mom's French. I lived in France for the first 18 years of my life, then came here to go to school at the College of William and Mary. I studied marketing. I really didn't know what I wanted to do, so I thought that's what I should do - study business - because it would give me the best chance to find work.

I feel that I'm in good company behind the wheel of the Williams FW08C. It was the first F1 car to be driven by the great Ayrton Senna, and it won the 1983 Monaco Grand Prix.

Even when I was 3 or 4 years old, I'd go out riding in the car with mom and dad, and I already knew all the songs off mom's Hank Williams and George Jones records by heart. I remember just sitting in the back seat and singing them at the top of my lungs.

Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo's sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey's angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.

I had lived with my mother in anger and love - I suppose most daughters do - but my children only knew her in one way: As the lady who thought they were smarter than Albert Einstein. As the lady who thought they wrote better than William Shakespeare. As the lady who thought every picture they drew was a Rembrandt.

The thing about 'Harry Potter' is it's great fun because of the people - I was usually with Julie Walters and Mark Williams, Brendan Gleeson, Robbie Coltrane, and the kids. Wonderful, funny, amazing people. If you're going to hang around on a set bored, you might as well do it with Julie Walters.

William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others.

That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt?

Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

The waters of spirituality are forever changing and forever constant. Prejudice or fixed ideas can only weigh you down and remove you from the flow. - The Book of Metanoia (D. Williamsen)

I did not know then what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion - which I could see he always harbored - that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment.

William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

I've also just finished filming the role of Robert Brown in 'Just William ' which is due to transmit on BBC One at Christmas.

I would take William H. Macy as a teacher any day of the week. He's incredible. He's got a lot of hard-earned experience.

I had a lot of success from the start. I never really was tested for long periods of time. I got my first professional job while I was a senior in college. I signed with the William Morris Agency before I graduated.