I've always taken my love of children from my father. He was a children magnet. Suddenly having my first child hit home what my dad went through.

I loved climbing because of the freedom and having time and space. I remember coming off Everest for the last time thinking of Dad and wishing that he could have seen what I saw. He would have loved it.

My dad is like a cactus - introverted and tough. I'm a people person like my mom but I got my competitiveness from my dad. He came to this country from Belarus with nothing and built a real business. He's my hero for giving me that need to run a business and for having enormous confidence in me.

The problem with me as far as getting married and having a family is that my comedy is so important to me. So I don't know if I'll ever be as good a dad as my dad.

Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorizing them in terms of class I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.

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.

There's sometimes a weird benefit to having an alcoholic violent father. He really motivated me in that I never wanted to be anything like him.

One of the hardest questions I have been asked is 'How will you manage the army if you are having menstrual cramps?' I have also been asked if I will have the courage to face criminals. My answer is that courage is not a matter of gender.

That's what acting is - it's about... having the courage to allow your audience into the private moments of your characters' lives.

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.

Success means having the courage the determination and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be.

I think there's a difference between ditzy and dumb. Dumb is just not knowing. Ditzy is having the courage to ask!

I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.

A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

My niece was very much caught up in the vampire craze for young adults and she thought having a vampire boyfriend would be a cool thing. What do you do on a first date? The more I thought about it the more fun I had imagining what you'd serve a vampire for dinner.

I love seeing people having fun. Everyone over in L.A. is too cool for it. That's the problem.

Almost all the fans I meet are pretty cool people. They're intelligent and tend to think about things a bit more than your average rock'n'roll fans: sensible people I wouldn't mind having a drink with.

You don't want to be too cool. But you don't want to be too dorky. Still I find it so much better to see a guy at a club being a dork and having fun than trying to be sexy.

Having your own character in a video game is pretty cool.

Ten years ago it was really difficult for a young actress to walk onto a set and disagree with the director and having that be OK and have a conversation about it and everyone be cool with it.

It's kinda cool seeing people having real fights with people they really know.

And I remember as a second or third grader having some autonomy to go to the store if I felt like it walk home take my time kick the can. We were on our own schedule after school so that was cool.

If the choice is between doing something supercool and having no one hear it and doing something equally cool and tricking people into putting it on the radio I don't think the second option is some big sellout.

In my books the technology that I choose to talk about has to serve the themes. What that means is that I end up having to cut out a lot of cool technology that would be really fun to describe and play with but which would just confuse everybody. So in 'Amped ' I focus on neural implants.