At her birthday my seven-year-old daughter will say that she wants these big cakes and certain expensive toys as presents and I can't say no to her. It would just break my heart. But when I was little for birthdays we just played outside and we were happy if we got any cake.

Well I started conducting kind of by accident. I wanted to give myself a special birthday present for my fortieth birthday and I was living in San Francisco at the time and I started attending some of the concerts and then simply dropping hints.

I get uncomfortable when people give me presents and watch me open them. I don't have birthday parties because the idea of a group of people singing and looking at me while I'm blowing out candles gives me hives.

I play PC and Xbox games at home and I just got a PSP as a birthday present.

I'm over the moon to be involved in the 'Doctor Who' Christmas special. I can't quite believe it as it's a part of the family tradition at the Jenkins household. I heard the news that I got the role on my 30th birthday and it was the best birthday present ever.

It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator our very self-consciousness is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.

My happiest memory of childhood was my first birthday in reform school. This teacher took an interest in me. In fact he gave me the first birthday presents I ever got: a box of Cracker Jacks and a can of ABC shoe polish.

Mum loves me being famous! She is so excited and proud as she had me so young and couldn't support me so I am living her dream it's sweeter for both of us. It's her 40th birthday soon and I'm going to buy her 40 presents.

I wrapped my Christmas presents early this year but I used the wrong paper. See the paper I used said 'Happy Birthday' on it. I didn't want to waste it so I just wrote 'Jesus' on it.

In 1993 my birthday present was a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

My biggest hero Gregory Peck was my birthday present on April 14 1973. I just sat and stared at him.

I often buy myself presents. Sometimes I will spend $100 000 in one day in a posh boutique.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.

I'm not materialistic. I believe in presents from the heart like a drawing that a child does.

A gift with a kind countenance is a double present.

There are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents and only one for birthday presents you know.

Presents don't really mean much to me. I don't want to sound mawkish but - it was the realization that I have a great many people in my life who really love me and who I really love.

The seven marvels that best represent man's achievements over the last 2 000 years will be determined by Internet vote... so look for Howard Stern's Private Parts to come in No. 1.

For the last five years we have been presented with the idea that Barack Obama is superhuman. Barack Obama is unlike any of us or anyone else. And he isn't. In fact he's much less achieved and much less accomplished than most who have gotten half as far as he has and I think maybe what we saw was the best.

For the greater beauty of the instrument the balls representing the planets are to be of considerable bigness but so contrived that they may be taken off at pleasure and others much smaller and fitter for some purposes put in their places.

Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.

We have to get back to the beauty of just being alive in this present moment.

My mum is my beauty icon because she represents what I think beauty is.