With the counseling of my family doctor my mother ended up turning to Weight Watchers and their children's program. I went to weekly meetings got counseling and would exercise with my peers who were my size. It was the first time I saw a proper children's portion size and it wasn't two burgers it was one.

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.

My family went through divorces and remarriages and the later blended home - and then watched that home explode too.

Like a lot of you I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.

I'm often asked if I regret not going to Hollywood. I'm glad I didn't go because if I had I wouldn't have my extended family which is the fabric of my life. Only recently have I realised how special and unusual it is.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and often is all that remains of it.

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended.

I found a religion that blended scientific reason with spiritual reality in a unifying faith far removed from the headlines of violence destruction and terrorism.

It was seldom that I attended any religious meetings as my parents had not much faith in and were never so unfortunate as to unite themselves with any of the religious sects.

Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.

Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that by creating a magnificent failure you plant the seed.

Ultimately all human activities have as their goal the realization of happiness. Why then have we ended up producing the opposite result? Could the underlying cause be our failure to correctly understand the true nature of happiness?

While I was trying to save money to go to the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Australia I ended up getting all of this experience which meant that by the time I had enough money in the bank to go to school I didn't really need to go to school anymore.

Reading the play at home however fulfilling can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended.

No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist?

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

I never intended for the Monster Ball to be a religious experience it just became one.

Experience is never limited and it is never complete it is an immense sensibility a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Abortion is defended today as a means of ensuring the equality and independence of women and as a solution to the problems of single parenting child abuse and the feminization of poverty.

New Zealand needs to balance its environmental responsibilities with its economic opportunities because the risk is that if you don't do that - and you want to lead the world - then you might end up getting unintended consequences.

I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.

This may sound strange but I had dreams as a kid of doing exactly what I ended up doing in my life.

Great dreams of great dreamers are always transcended.

Being in the design industry I've tended to meet more people who are affected by HIV and AIDS.