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.