I take my kids to school. And if I go to work, I go to work, and they visit me on set. I come home. I have dinner with my family. I have breakfast with my family. I have a very solid, very warm home.

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.

I’m drawn to bad romances.

Love possesses not nor will it be possessed, for love is sufficient unto love.

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

It’s so much easier to like people, and to let people in, to trust them until they prove that you should do otherwise. The alternative is being an iceberg.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.

I’ve been through natural disasters. I lived down in Miami and was down there for Hurricane Andrew which was a Category 5. There were members of my family that thought they were going to die. Everyone was in the bathtub.

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

Most of us are raised to believe we are ordinary. The anchor of the universe is present in every child. A parent only needs to guide and step aside and let them fulfill their dharma. Help children remember that they can do or be anything.

My grandpa was a preacher.

Be polite to all, but intimate with few.

If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.

It’s probably the worst feeling in the world, when you’re deeply and madly in love with a woman and you know she’s not feeling you the same way, and you don’t know why.

I love to flirt, and I’ve never met a man I didn’t like.

I always wanted to be a father and thought it would be great, but it just took the right woman and the right time to make it all happen.

I think your values are always influenced by your family and your community.

Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.

When I cook for my family on Christmas, I make feijoada, a South American dish of roasted and smoked meats like ham, pork, beef, lamb, and bacon – all served with black beans and rice. It’s festive but different.

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

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.

The reason children accept discipline from their parents is because they know their parents love them.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

We may have our private opinions but why should they be a bar to the meeting of hearts?

My enthusiasm seems to cause my world to endlessly offer me cooperative, co-creating experiences. I’m willing and I’m eager, and not just about my writing – I feel the same way about staying in shape, enjoying my family, giving a lecture, or whatever it may be.

I do not raise brats!

I love being busy.

All of us have moments in our lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them.

I’m a human being and I fall in love and sometimes I don’t have control of every situation.

All the learnin‘ my father paid for was a bit o‘ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

My parents were just constantly affirming me in everything that I did. Late at night, I’d wake up and hear my mother talking over my bed, saying, ‚You’re going to do great on this test. You can do anything you want.‘

Life guided me to being a bodyguard, protecting people, then in the movies, so I’m happy with everything because basically all I ever wanted to do was be a good son and take care of my mother.

I consider the fact that thousands of children die each day from starvation and a lack of medicine a crisis for humanity and a problem we must collectively attempt to solve.

As I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family – my aunties, grandparents – is in Africa.

Children have always responded to me because I have that cartoon-character look.

A mother deserves a day off to care for a sick child or sick parent without running into hardship – and you know what, a father does, too. It’s time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a ‚Mad Men‘ episode.

I imagine I will be less involved in film and be focused more on family and foreign affairs.

All my stepchildren carried the burden of my fame. Sometimes they would read terrible things about me, and I’d worry about whether it would hurt them. I would tell them: ‚Don’t hide these things from me. I’d rather you ask me these things straight out, and I’ll answer all your questions.‘

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.

Wives are people who feel they don’t dance enough.

Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.

The loss of a child is my greatest nightmare.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

My mother did not like children.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

That nice, soft pillow and the warm blanket, and it’s all comfortable, and no one wants to leave that comfort – but if you can wake up early in the morning, get a head start on everyone else that’s still sleeping, get productive time doing things that you need to do – that’s a huge piece to moving your life forward.

Every man’s reputation proceeds from those of his own household.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

I can’t relate to lazy people. We don’t speak the same language. I don’t understand you. I don’t want to understand you.

But, you know, you can’t be a star at home.

Every day, the people I meet inspire me… every day, they make me proud… every day they remind me how blessed we are to live in the greatest nation on earth.

I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn’t afford to pay attention.

Everyone got kind of crazy with me mentioning I was in love with a woman.

Be nice to your children. After all, they are going to choose your nursing home.

Work is making a living out of being bored.

I think, because I started Virgin when I was a teenager, it has become a part of me, like my family, and I am motivated by ambition for it, almost as if it were a child.

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.

To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.

When Nirvana became popular, you could very easily slip and get lost during that storm. I fortunately had really heavy anchors – old friends, family.

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.