I was painfully shy, so my aunt suggested to my mum that me and my brother go to Stage 84, a performing arts school in Yorkshire. I've probably romanticised it in my head, but I seem to remember that in the space of an hour's drama workshop, I was transformed. I went in really shy, and I came out full of confidence.
A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.
I do feel blessed to have small ears - I've never felt self-conscious when my hair is swept back. My feet are a different story - I grew up being painfully aware of them because they are so long.
As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn't really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn't have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.
As I've said many times, Vote Leave could only win because the Establishment's OODA loops are broken - as the Brexit negotiations painfully demonstrate daily - and they are systematically bad at decisions, and this created just enough space for us to win.
The answer to New Orleans's levee woes is painfully obvious: money and willpower.
My mom is painfully sweet; she's from Nebraska.
For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves.
In my 20s and early 30s, I was very much a man lost at sea, with very little direction in life, and painfully immature.
You might as well enjoy the day - you never know when and how painfully it could all end.
