My work's never been accepted by my family but it's something I'll always carry on with.

As a novelist I mined my history my family and my memory but in a very specific way. Writing fiction I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

We need to recognise that what really matters isn't buying more and more consumer goods but family friends and knowing that we are doing something worthwhile with our lives. Helping to reduce the appalling consequences of world poverty should be part of that reassessment.

Family involvement is a valuable thing and playing together actively can be the '90s version of it. Instead of just watching you can do it together... something we don't spend enough time on. We can motivate and excite each other about fitness.

I have a great family by the way but you need to find people who can pull something out from you that might be otherwise unseen.

But when you lose a family member or something tragic happens that stays with you forever. You never get over it. Knowing that you have to deal with that for the rest of your life... Football is important but not as important as you once thought it was.

I just want to be healthy and stay alive and keep my family going and everything and keep my friends going and try to do something so that this world will be peaceful. That is the most ambitious and the most difficult thing but I'm there trying to do it.

There's something about being with a group of people who become like family that must be needed in society.

I come from a family of losers and I've rejected my family as something I don't want to be like.

As they say in Italy Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.