When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.

Every teacher in elementary school loved me because I was always goofing around. I was taller than most of the guys and girls, and fattest, too.

My job requires me to put on a little dress and run around the streets of New York in heels. But I also had the financial means to hire a yoga teacher to come to my house while my sitter watched the newborn. For 95 percent of the world, that's not realistic.

A father is a person who's around, participating in a child's life. He's a teacher who helps to guide and shape and mold that young person, someone for that young person to talk to, to share with, their ups and their downs, their fears and their concerns.

You know how you're in elementary school and the teacher goes around the room and, like, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' I said, 'NBA player.' And she's like, 'Well, OK. Maybe pick a real job.' But I really believed it. I felt like I was meant to be here.

Most of my teachers wanted to send me to the principal's office. But my fourth-grade teacher once put her arms around me and said, 'You sure write well.' And I've had good penmanship until this day. She was the only one who ever said anything nice to me. That's the kind of motivation that students need.

My teacher told my mum, 'I think William has dyspraxia,' and Mum asked what that meant. She said, 'Well, if I put a chair in the middle of the room and asked every child in the class to walk around it, William would be the only child in the class to walk into it.' Mum was like, 'Yeah, that's my boy'.

My teacher told me I'd never amount to anything. I left high school at 15, after one year. But my real teachers were all the people around me. And I was a good listener.

Obviously, after the accident, I felt let down. Questions arose: Why me? Why was I the one to suffer? People around me started giving me looks of sympathy which made me feel worse. But then, I pulled myself together and decided to win over the disability.

Any other illness and you have time off work, but there is a lot of stigma around mental illness. It's frightening to talk about it. The people suffering don't want sympathy.

You don't go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be.

My definition of success is to live your life in a way that causes you to feel a ton of pleasure and very little pain - and because of your lifestyle, have the people around you feel a lot more pleasure than they do pain.

When you're around enormously successful people you realise their success isn't an accident - it's about work.

Those who cannot work with their hearts achieve but a hollow, half-hearted success that breeds bitterness all around.

The hardest part of fame and success is adapting to the people around you that's changing. It changes the way people look at you from how they used to look at you. They listen to you on the radio, they look at you on TV and when people speak on you in a good light, you have a couple people who hold grudges.

Success makes so many people hate you. I wish it wasn't that way. It would be wonderful to enjoy success without seeing envy in the eyes of those around you.

I want kids to understand that strength doesn't come from what goes on around you. It comes from inside you, and that comes from Jesus Christ.

The people I used to have around me from Nashville was showing love to the Cash Money clique on the strength of Buck trying to make it; making sure Buck gets to where he gots to go.

America's strength is not our diversity; our strength is our ability to unite people of different backgrounds around common principles. A common language is necessary to reach that goal.

The serve, I was too young and too small and... not enough powerful to have a good serve when I was young, so my forehand was always my signature shot. So I used to always run around my backhand, you know, use my forehand as much as I could, and so that's why I think it's my strength also today, you know.

With any luck, Heaven itself will resemble a vast used bookstore, with a really good cafe in one corner, serving dark beer and kielbasa to keep up one's strength while browsing, and all around will be the kind of angels usually found in Victoria's Secret catalogs.

So many older people, they just sit around all day long and they don't get any exercise. Their muscles atrophy, and they lose their strength, their energy and vitality by inactivity.

If you're growing up in a chaotic world without reason, your instinct is to become a performer and control the circumstances around you. You lead from weakness into strength; you have an undefended back.

I am an example of what is possible when girls from the very beginning of their lives are loved and nurtured by people around them. I was surrounded by extraordinary women in my life who taught me about quiet strength and dignity.