One of the things I like about when I tour sometimes is that occasionally you'll see a dad there with his 12-year-old son and they're both enjoying it.

My mother and dad were big animal lovers too. I just don't know how I would have lived without animals around me. I'm fascinated by them - both domestic pets and the wild community. They just are the most interesting things in the world to me and it's made such a difference in my lifetime.

My father came from a very poor background but I was very fortunate in the sense that we were never in need. My dad was determined to make sure that we didn't want for things. He wanted to give us more opportunity than he had a better shot at a better life.

Not much shocked me. You know I worked in a home for Alzheimer's patients and my dad used to be really into murders and stuff so I saw dead bodies. It desensitised me to a lot of things.

My humanitarian work evolved from being with my family. My mom my dad they really set a great example for giving back. My mom was a nurse my dad was a school teacher. But my mom did a lot of things for geriatrics and elderly people. She would do home visits for free.

I haven't been baptised. My dad's not in the church and is not a religious person. My mum is more spiritual - she does Thai-chi and goes to Stonehenge and things like that. I'm proud to be pagan. Finland is not really a religious country. I'm still looking for my god.

My dad says I could sing before I could talk if that's possible. I was always humming and things like that.

One of the scary things is that when you're a kid you look at your dad as the man who has no fear. When you're an adult you realize your father had fear and that you have it too.

My Dad used to tell us: 'En este pais ustedes van a poder lograr todas las cosas que nosotros no pudimos' 'In this country you will be able to accomplish all the things we never could.'

My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.

Where I come from you don't really talk about how much you're earning. Those things are private. My dad never told my mum how much he was earning. I'm certainly not going to tell the world. I'm doing well.

I like to think my dad was easygoing and kind and I think some of those things have been passed down. I am like him in a sense of being positive and hopeful. He was compassionate and I've got a lot of that in me as well.

So my father was a person who never lied to me. If I had a question he answered it. I knew a lot of things at a young age because I was intrigued.

Fathers in today's modern families can be so many things.

Being a father being a friend those are the things that make me feel successful.

To him that waits all things reveal themselves provided that he has the courage not to deny in the darkness what he has seen in the light.

Greatness in the last analysis is largely bravery - courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards and respectable ways of doing things.

I think what I would say to my younger self and probably to younger just starting-out writers is that a lot of times you're just afraid to put yourself out there and it's uncomfortable because it's working up the courage to do something to push yourself to do those things.

Well I think that - I think leadership's always been about two main things: imagination and courage.

A man of courage flees forward in the midst of new things.

Everybody even me sometimes had to compromise on something doing things we know to be wrong and this happens doing whatever job in the world. But a singer must have the courage of saying no.

I have always had the courage for the new things that life sometimes offers.

One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.