I don't get fat, I get skinny.

My mother and father have always drilled in to me that work is very important.

My father is very dry and very quick-witted, and my mother is very silly. It was the perfect combination because I got an education in physical and verbal comedy.

My father was always getting excited about something. It's genetically inside me somewhere.

Can you make a mistake and miss your fate?

I always thought, 'Will I go into the business, or will I not go into the business?' But when my father got arrested, I really didn't have a choice. I was the oldest son, and it was something that had to be done.

My father, Cecil Banks Mullis, and mother, formerly Bernice Alberta Barker, grew up in rural North Carolina in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My dad's family had a general store, which I never saw. My grandparents on his side had already died before I started noticing things.

I'm very old-fashioned in some ways because of my father, who thought that being a public servant was an honor. Everyone must find a capacity in which they can serve, because we all benefit from society.

My father would not pay for me to study anything but engineering or math in college.

So as I was growing up, my father was always in the middle of making a film or preparing a film. It was a full-time, all-consuming type of operation.

My father died in France, and my sisters and I went over with my mum to bring back his body. I remember going to the funeral parlour in France and being given a laminated menu of coffins, and thinking, surely there is an ice cream at the back of here!

My father was the first entrepreneur in the family. He started his own record label, his own restaurant. He knew that, in order to give something back to the people, he had to create.

My own father flipped out on me when I told him we decided to ditch our doctor and go with a midwife instead.

As an undergrad, I studied engineering physics at the University of Oklahoma, and all my degrees are from engineering departments. My father wanted me to join him in the oil-field business in Oklahoma, but I wanted to be a scientist.

When I attained my seventh year, my father, whose ear was unmusical but who was nevertheless passionately fond of music, gave me my elementary lessons on the violin; in a very few months, I was able to play all manner of compositions at sight.

The most important thing my father taught me is that every man has to stand up for his rights.

When President Hassan Rouhani was elected in Iran in 2013, he welcomed back the far-flung children of Iran. But one by one, they have been arrested and imprisoned upon their return, a fate that has made me increasingly reluctant to risk going back to a homeland I've not seen since 1992.

My father had a very violent temper, and he was never home. So I was kind of a mama's boy.

Yes, you do need to be doing cardio to shed fat but no, you don't need to be going for hour long runs pounding pavement or hitting the treadmill every day.

The funny thing is all these school shootings that we have, always happen in very religious communities. Maybe it's because the centre of their lives is a big fat nothing and it's just a fantasy and there's nothing there. I think maybe that might have something to do with it.