Did I have a mis-spent youth? I suppose I did in that I left school early without any qualifications, having bunked off a few times for tournaments.

The memories for the missed opportunities are stronger than for the ones I managed to get over the line in.

In all the years I've been playing, I've never considered changing my cue. It was the first cue I ever bought, aged 13, picked from a cabinet in a Dunfermline snooker centre just because I liked the Rex Williams signature on it. I saved £40 to buy it. It's a cheap bit of wood, and it's been the butt of other players' jokes for ages."

I could have had eight or nine world titles at least, and you do think about that at times.

On the strength of Vonnegut's reputation, 'Breakfast of Champions' spent a year on the best-seller lists, proving that he could indeed publish anything and make money.

Starting a business from scratch and having little money in the bank focuses your mind in a way that running a multibillion-dollar business never does. It brings the key drivers of performance into sharp relief. I promise.

I believe in capitalism for everybody, not necessarily high finance but capitalism that works for the working men and women of this country who are out there paddling alone in America right now.

During my undergraduate training at UCLA, I was studying finance and securities; my particular interest was with mutual funds. Wanting to get into a high position at some of the companies that were doing that, I knew that law would be useful.