Major success feels a bit like a coronation. Like I'd become a king. I was one of the most famous people in the world loved and hated in equal measure. I couldn't see anything bad with it. It made me a happy person.

I don't know if this is the kind of retrospective analysis that people are fond of applying to their work or actions but it feels like I knew I was going to be famous and I knew that an element of that would be traumatic so that if I could make myself something big and otherworldly it would be a kind of defence.

Pulp existed for 12 years before we got famous. Now you could say that was just lack of imagination but it's some kind of quality isn't it? Tenacity. You could also say it was sloth.

I always loved working as an actress but I didn't understand why I couldn't just opt out of being famous. And then I realized you can and I think I did. And eventually I came to understand that you can do that and also keep working.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

I could have been a dental hygienist with nothing bad ever appearing in print about me but that's not how I've chosen to lead my life. I knew that you put yourself under a microscope the more famous you become.

Touring is tough. You're almost in a haze because you don't really know where you are half the time: You're in a hotel room one moment and the next thing you know you're onstage performing for 60 000 people then you're back on an airplane. It's very hectic and I couldn't do it without my family.

Alzheimer's Parkinson's brain and spinal cord disorders diabetes cancer at least 58 diseases could potentially be cured through stem cell research diseases that touch every family in America and in the world.

When Nirvana became popular you could very easily slip and get lost during that storm. I fortunately had really heavy anchors - old friends family.

The purpose of the Seder to my mind is to inspire conversations with your family about the human drama and hopefully transmit values to the next generation. I've always felt like this could be better.

Like a lot of you I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.

We all wish we could be in more than one place at the same time. People with families feel guilty all the time-if we spend too much time with our family we feel we're not working hard enough.

I can't say it's not painful being estranged from most of my family. I wish it could be otherwise.

I married him because he told me it was the only way he could protect me. If we were just manager and client my family could do whatever they wanted to get me back but if I was his wife they couldn't.

As they say in Italy Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.

But if each man could have his own house a large garden to cultivate and healthy surroundings - then I thought there will be for them a better opportunity of a happy family life.

My parents were drawn to the idea that there was space and opportunity in Australia. For the meagre sum of £10 you could sail your entire family out to Australia so that's what my father chose to do.

The lover of life makes the whole world into his family just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found from those that could be found and those who are impossible to find.

I bought a lot of rubbish things that kids buy: skateboards and clothes and typical teenage stuff. And as soon as I could I wasted a lot of money on cars - BMW's mostly - for myself and my family.

As a child the family that I had and the love I had from my two parents allowed me to go ahead and be more aggressive to search and to take risks knowing that if I failed I could always come home to a family of love and support.

I came from a poor family so working and going to school at the same time was natural. It taught me multi-tasking although we didn't call it that back then. I learned I could never be idle I need to be doing many things at once.

I guess you could say I devoted myself so strongly to my music that for awhile I forgot about my family. But I only get one set of parents and I think I forgot about that for a little while.

The breakdown of the black community in order to maintain slavery began with the breakdown of the black family. Men and women were not legally allowed to get married because you couldn't have that kind of love. It might get in the way of the economics of slavery. Your children could be taken from you and literally sold down the river.

In that I found being able to talk to my family about my feelings praying for strength and realizing that our lives have a deep purpose and the journey of our lives is to find out what that is and express it was the only way I could have gotten through it.