Your personality as the prime minister feeds through to what you emphasise and what you don't how you'll handle a situation - whether you've got the combination of intelligence or instincts to adapt and to make good decisions.

This CD became something of a personal journey for me. The tone of the whole CD is uplifting and inspirational. It's an upper. We have enough downers in the world.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

I don't want to discredit people's individuality but I think people are pretty much the same. People are very similar. If you have a good enough imagination then you can feel things that you personally have never done before. That's acting.

Growing up I didn't have a lot of toys and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

Personally I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.

Imagine for yourself a character a model personality whose example you determine to follow in private as well as in public.

I was a precocious only child and then I went through a fat awkward stage for several years so I learned to fall back on my humor and personality when I was growing up. It's how you survive so I think it was more of a natural progression for me developing into comedy.

While many of us never knew Ronald Reagan personally we felt close to him because we shared his lighthearted sense of humor admired his uncommon virtue and were moved by his remarkable wisdom.