With millions of family wage manufacturing jobs lost since 2001 we need an energy bill that takes bold action to tap into American ingenuity in order to lead the world in new clean energy technology rather than playing catch-up to the Japanese Danish and Germans.

My father was a schoolteacher and my mother came from a teacher's family.

I was on Oprah's show recently talking about the people who impacted me the most. One was a teacher and one was my soccer coach. I didn't even go into my family who had the most influence.

It was my family that wanted me to be a teacher. That was safe you see. To be a painter was terrible.

I came from a family where I felt great pressure to be financially successful and I felt that staying in Chicago and doing theater I was in all likelihood not going to find financial success.

I think that everybody in the world whatever colour or creed has a jerk like JR in his or her family somewhere. Whether it is a father uncle cousin or brother everybody can identify with JR and that certainly had something to do with the success of 'Dallas.'

I'm starting to judge success by the time I have for myself the time I spend with family and friends. My priorities aren't amending they're shifting.

My sense of personal strength has always come from my family.

It's a wonderful side effect of what we're doing to give someone the strength to come out of the closet to their family or simply present themselves aesthetically in a way they feel happy with whether or not their friends are going to be allowed to like them anymore.

And partly the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.