I remember watching a 'Big Brother' contestant saying that she wanted to be a footballer's wife. I thought, 'What is the world coming to?'

I am too much of a worrier. I'm the person who thinks about calling round all the hospitals when someone is five minutes later than they said they would be.

When I left university with a history degree, I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I was terrified of accidentally ending up in the wrong career.

My dad used to cut out newspaper ads and post them to me in the hope I'd get a proper job.

Science fiction has been an inspiration to generations of scientists and engineers, and the film series 'Star Wars' is no exception.

Mostly, in song writing, my experience is that there isn't so much inspiration as hard work. You sit there for hours, days and weeks with a guitar and piano until something good comes. But the urge to write is something you have to have. A conviction, an ambition to write and never stop until you think, 'This is the best I can do.'

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values.