When I was 18 I thought my father was pretty dumb. After a while when I got to be 21 I was amazed to find out how much he'd learned in three years.

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

They put me in a harness like a horse to learn the back somersault. It was weird up there when I put on that harness for the first time. The courage came with practice.

I'm a writer of faith who worries about the intolerance of religion. I look at the past and fear we haven't learned from it. I believe that humanity is capable of evil as well as great acts of courage and goodness. I have hope. Deep down I believe in the human spirit although sometimes that belief is shaken.

I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest not just military service.

The one thing I learned the most about acting is it takes a tremendous amount of courage to go there and stand still. It takes courage and guts to step out of your mind frame and depict something.

I'm still shy - I'm no good at my children's parent-teacher conferences and I'm slowly learning how to ask for what I want. But I now know that I have a reserve of courage to draw upon when I really need it. There's nothing that I'm too scared to have a go at.

TV is so different from the movies. It takes a lot of stamina because you work such long hours. It is really challenging. You are learning the next day's lines while you are shooting today's scenes. I found courage I never realised I had. I hope to do more.

We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow and courage from the jay who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid but he who conquers that fear.