I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast conforming suburb of the soul.

Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn't there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow hard bare and dark space a lot of us spend their lives.

I think 'Dilbert' will remain popular as long as employees are frustrated and they fear the consequences of complaining too loudly. 'Dilbert' is the designated voice of discontent for the workplace. I never planned it that way. It just happened.

When you are 16 there is no fear whatsoever. As you get older you play in more important games and that is when you start thinking about what will happen if you win or lose.

It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.

I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.

Fame is something I think happens as a result of trying to do good work. If you're trying to be famous your work usually suffers.

It wasn't not being famous any more or even not being a recording artist. It was having nobody who needed me no phones ringing nothing to do. Because I'm still too young to do nothing. I was only 24 when all that happened. Now at 40 I feel I've got more to give than I ever have.

I don't feel I was ever a 'famous' child actor. I was just a working actor who happened to be a kid. I was never really in a hit show until I was a teenager with West Wing playing First Daughter Zoey Bartlet. In a way that was my saving grace - not being a star on a hit show. It kept me working and kept me grounded.

I always thought it was strange when these artists like Kurt Cobain or whoever would get really famous and say 'I don't understand why this is happening to me.' There is a mathematical formula to why you got famous. It isn't some magical thing that just started happening.

I'm just not a private person. It's not like I do things because I want things to be public it's just that's my way of expressing myself and I happen to be very famous.

I know I had my equivalents in Adrian Lester and Lenny James when I was at drama school. I remember David Harewood doing 'Othello' at the National and Adrian Lester having done Cheek by Jowl's famous 'As You Like It and Company' at the Donmar. Not necessarily performances I saw but just the fact they happened was massively encouraging.

I'd die if I was Madonna. I'd die. God what a horrible way to live. And Michael Jackson! To be so famous and to feel so isolated. I feel so bad for them. I don't know how it feels and I hope it never happens to me.

The poster boy for our superabled future is Oscar Pistorius an increasingly famous South African sprinter who happens to have had both of his legs amputated below the knee. Using upside down question mark-shaped carbon fiber sprinting prosthetics called Cheetah blades Mr. Pistorius can challenge the fastest sprinters in the world.

None of my characters are rich or famous and the situations they find themselves in could happen to anyone.

It wasn't being an alcoholic - it was going wild. It happened when I got famous. It was like having my teens in my early thirties: blotting out your life not having to think about anything.

Anytime you cast a movie and you need someone famous in the lead part you're a prisoner of whoever happens to be famous in the six-month window in which you're trying to get a film financed.

Well I would say that we're regular people first of all and we're normal and it's obvious by some of the things that have happened just because our name is famous we're not immune to tragedy.

I have a profound empathy for people who are in the public eye whether they manifest it themselves or whether it happened by accident - it doesn't matter to me. I think there's a great misunderstanding of what it is to be famous.

You have no idea how humiliating it was as a boy to suddenly have all your clothes your toys snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed I felt dirty.

The sad events that occur in my life are the sad events that happen to everybody with losing friends and family but that is a natural occurrence as natural as being born.

As a novelist I mined my history my family and my memory but in a very specific way. Writing fiction I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

But when you lose a family member or something tragic happens that stays with you forever. You never get over it. Knowing that you have to deal with that for the rest of your life... Football is important but not as important as you once thought it was.

I think the American Dream says that anything can happen if you work hard enough at it and are persistent and have some ability. The sky is the limit to what you can build and what can happen to you and your family.