The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they’re gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you’re going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.

I wanted to be a skinny little ballerina but I was a voluptuous little Italian girl whose dad had meatballs on the table every night.

It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.

As a father, I always want my son to be perfect. When he was young, I tried to train him in martial arts, but he said, ‚I don’t want to become like Bruce Lee’s son, with everybody telling me how good my father was.‘ I just think my son is too lazy.

The only big things I’ve purchased are my dad’s heart valve and a Rolls-Royce for my parents, for their anniversary. And that was only because my dad had a Lady Gaga license plate on our old car and it was making me crazy because he was getting followed everywhere, so I bought him a new car.

It wasn’t so long ago that I was a working mom myself. And I know that sometimes, much as we all hate to admit it, it’s just easier to park the kids in front of the TV for a few hours, so we can pay the bills or do the laundry or just have some peace and quiet for a change.

I think I have had so much blessing – I’ve had my brother, who was brilliant – I think my family came closest to making a genius when they made my brother – Bailey was just all of that. He loved me.

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

My ultimate life dream project is my kids. My family.

Remember, it’s as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was put to the grammar-school at eight years of age, my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church.

The way I try to represent my family and coaches, I think all are characteristics the league aspires to portray. That’s just who I am.

I think any activity you have your kids in, you’re all trying to live vicariously through them. And you’re jealous of the kid that’s naturally more talented or has the facility, the body, the genes, or the God-given talent. People get jealous of that.

One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I’m from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.

The kids are old enough now – I just want to let them be kids. I don’t want to comment on them too much. They’re at an age where I just want to let them be kids.

I’ve had moments when I’ve thought about somebody, picked up the phone to call them and they are on the line already, and I think that maybe there’s some vibration, some connection.

What ever disunites man from God, also disunites man from man.

Historically, the family has played the primary role in educating children for life, with the school providing supplemental scaffolding to the family.

Our lifestyle was not in any way a negative. That was not the problem. That is and will remain one of the wonderful opportunities we are able to give our children.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

I didn’t start sweating until I had children. That was one of the first things I realized when my daughter Violet was born – I started getting wicked BO. You know there’s a difference between basketball BO and stress BO? This was definitely stress BO. Like, new dad BO.

As long as possible, I would really like to complete one marathon per year. Though my time has been slowing down as I get older, it has become a very important part of my life.

Children make your life important.

She would have thrived as a grandmother. I know how much she would have contributed to their lives, and I am sad they will miss out on that.

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.

Life’s too short to deal with other people’s insecurities.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

My dad was like a stage mother he always pushed me to do what I wanted.

Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.

Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions.

Anger is certainly a kind of baseness, as it appears well in the weakness of those subjects in whom it reigns: children, women, old folks, sick folks.

I don’t travel with them, but they can’t be missing in my home. There have to always be dominoes… I used to play with my family – dad, my grandpa, my uncles.

We’re hardwired for connection. There’s no arguing with the bioscience. But we can want it so badly we’re trying to hot-wire it.

But I was the most unashamed lone parent you were ever going to meet.

He didn’t come out of my belly, but my God, I’ve made his bones, because I’ve attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I’m so proud of all those things. But he is my biggest pride.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman’s normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.

My fans saw me get engaged, saw me make that woman my wife, me having kids, me divorcing, me talking about divorce before the divorce, me talking about my kids‘ reaction to that divorce.

Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.

My friends, there are no friends.

I was offered a job on Wall Street by my uncle. But I wanted to get out. Make-it-on-my-own kinda thing.

Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.

I was adored once too.

I have a very good family. I’m very fortunate to have a very good family. I believe very strongly in the family. It’s one of the things we have in our platform, is to talk about it.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

My mother would kill me if I posed nude! My mother raised me with certain standards.

The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.

We’re all bombarded with so many dietary messages that it’s hard to find time to sort through all this information, but we do have time to take a look at our kids‘ plates.

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.

My dream is to be World Lightweight Champion in the UFC. Have more money than I know what to do with. And have a great life for my kids, grandkids, and everyone in my family.

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

What sweetness is left in life, if you take away friendship? Robbing life of friendship is like robbing the world of the sun. A true friend is more to be esteemed than kinsfolk.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.