Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.

As a cartoonist, I am not interested in defending the dominant, the powerful, the well-resourced and the well-armed because such groups are usually not in need of advocacy, moral support or sympathetic understanding; they have already organised sufficient publicity for themselves and prosecute their points of view with great efficiency.

So few humans seem to fully exist themselves that I wonder if all this endless speculation and haggling about God is really an exploration of a more interesting and embarrassing question about ourselves.

At the age of nine, I simultaneously fell in love with two Dutch sisters because they seemed so beautifully strange, and their clothes were mysterious and alluring - added to which, they could not speak a word of English. More than anything, I wanted to connect with them and embark on a vast journey of exploration.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.

Obviously we had to study Shakespeare at school, but to be honest, I was not a fan. I found the language very difficult, and I didn't enjoy watching it or studying it. I auditioned five times for the Royal Shakespeare Company early on in my career, and I didn't even get past the first rounds.

Service life will continue to be a force for good, providing a career, training, and education to men and women from all walks of life - who generally love their time in service and do well when they leave. For those who don't, the government continues to help.

My elementary school teachers were big on pushing kids to read. If you read a certain amount of books, they would provide you with incentives, sort of like what we are doing with the WrestleMania Reading Challenge.