Gareth Bale

Whenever I get days off, I go home, or friends and family come up. I'm in contact with them every day, so it's like we live next door, but obviously we live in two different countries. Football is my job, and everyone around me has given me the opportunity to purely concentrate on football, and everyone else worries about everything else.

I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.

I haven't checked this out yet, but one of our guys told me we have a counselor within 45 minutes to an hour of most small businesses in this country. That's really powerful. I call it our bone structure.

When I have a creative insight, there is a high. I think back in the day, I made music as much as I did because it made me feel so good. I think you could argue that there is a creative addiction - but, you know, the healthy kind.