When I was a kid my step dad started this business and would go out and get lost cows and stuff. He was part-time truck driver farmer and cowboy. He taught me how to ride from an early age.

After graduating from flares and platforms in the early 1970s I started drama school wearing a pair of khaki dungarees with one of my Dad's Army shirts accessorised by a cat's basket doubling as a handbag. Very Lady Gaga.

When I started writing I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.

I met Gemma my wife when she was 12. She had a schoolgirl crush on me and her dad had arranged for her to meet me. Later she started coming to my concerts but I only got to know her well after her mother died. I rang to see how she was and that's how it started.

It wasn't like I was self-motivated. My dad started me. It was his dream before it was mine.

We all started snowboarding in the beginning as a family just to be closer together go on trips. It was our soccer but instead of Dad yelling at me from the sideline he is there riding with me and hitting the jumps even before I am hitting them.

I mean I look at my dad. He was twenty when he started having a family and he was always the coolest dad. He did everything for his kids and he never made us feel like he was pressured. I know that it must be a great feeling to be a guy like that.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26 which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

But we got up there and decided to stick to this mix of power chords and funk and that's where it really started for us. In having the courage to take that decision. To take a gamble not just with our music but our lives.

I think there are four or five interesting pockets where a lot of cool technology companies are getting started. Chicago is one of them. New York is certainly another. Silicon Valley really dominates. And you're seeing some stuff out of Boston and Seattle and down South.

I used to skip out of high school and go flying. It was just one of those things I thought it was kind of a cool thing to do. I never thought about doing that as a profession but I started checking things out and I found out there was a flight school down in Daytona Beach called Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

When I first started acting I was about nine years old. I had never been to audition in my life and my agent sent me out. It was just a commercial for 'Harry Potter.' That was the first thing I ever went out for and I got the 'Harry Potter' commercial which was really cool but I didn't play Harry Potter.

I never really loved school through junior high but then I started running track my freshman year and I was just like 'Wow this is cool!'

So when I got to be about 13 or 14 I started listening - even though my parents music was way cool - to contemporary hard rock at that time which was Aerosmith Cheap Trick Black Sabbath AC/DC Ted Nugent and all that and that's just where I came from.

When certain bootleg companies started off and they would take maybe ten per cent of whatever they got and help fuel new bands which I'm cool with I think that's a good idea. Most of the record companies are not doing that.

When I decided to launch my first knitwear line it was because I saw a void in the basics category. The editors were always looking for cool fashion-forward tees and sweaters. So that's where I started.

I could finally quit my job as a bartender and stop dreaming that I might be Superman and know that I was. Then I started thinking about how cool it was.

There's a lot of gimmick infringement out there but that's cool. It's a compliment. But it all started right when I first came into the Garden. I came down to 'Eye of the Tiger' and when I hit the ring with the Sheik I just put my hand up to my ear by accident and the crowd got louder. I was like 'Oh that works.'

When the first computers started to come in we tried to digitalize the seismological equipment.

There were no PCs when I started programming on computers.

I started getting into Internet technologies and computers. I wasn't especially interested in being a musician but I wound up finding my way back to being interested in music through computers.

That's the new way - with computers computers computers. That's the way we can have the cell survive and get some new information in high resolution. We started about five years ago and today I think we have reached the target.

I started on an Apple II which I had bought at the very end of 1978 for half of my annual income. I made $4 500 a year and I spent half of it on the computer.

I started on the use of the Internet for scientific communication. Our research group was one of the very first to make really systematic use of it as a way of managing research projects.