I was brought up, as a lot of kids are, on 'Aesop's Fables,' 'Brothers Grimm,' 'La Fontaine,' all those sorts of things. Hans Christian Andersen is a hero of mine.

Being his real brother I could feel I live in his shadows, but I never have and I do not now. I live in his glow.

The big relationships you make in your life are with those that you love and if things do go wrong then it's a source of great pain and that lasts.

One of the great failings of our education system is that we tend to focus on those who are succeeding in exams, and there are plenty of them. But what we should also be looking at, and a lot more urgently, is those who fail.

If you have to ask/request your adult children to do good things, you have not done good/enough job when they were kids.

When I was growing up in the Forties and Fifties, you could hide your children from the difficulties of life, but today you can't separate children's contact with the adult world today.