My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families – second families, perhaps I should say.

My whole family are hams. They’re storytellers and everyone outdoes the next one.

I believe that God’s dream is that we be successful in our careers, and that we be able to send our kids to college. I don’t mean that everyone is going to be rich, and I preach a lot on blooming where you’re planted. But I don’t have the mindset that money is a bad thing.

Train up a child in the way that he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

My father used to wear the same pants for like a week.

My mother, my grandmother, my uncles would play Ethiopian artists like Aster Aweke and Mulatu Astatke all the time in the house.

Like every parent, when you start your family, your life completely changes. And you completely live for someone else. I find that the most extraordinary thing. Your life is handed over to someone else. From that moment on, they come first in every choice you make. It’s the most wonderful thing.

For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you’d would wake up times and hope that the next day you’d be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home.

I would as soon leave my son a curse as the almighty dollar.

Counsel with your parents is a privilege at any age.

My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn’t have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.

When I get up and work out, I’m working out just as much for my girls as I am for me, because I want them to see a mother who loves them dearly, who invests in them, but who also invests in herself. It’s just as much about letting them know as young women that it is okay to put yourself a little higher on your priority list.

All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

My mother and my father have been married 50 years, and he’s just started to understand that something’s wrong with the system. He accepted the whole thing, you see. Yet this industrious kind of engagement didn’t bring him the success, according to American terms, that he wanted. I was probably affected by this very much. In fact, I know I was.

My parents were divorced by the time I was even conscious – like, I don’t remember them ever being together.

You think I’m going to ask these sweet 14 year olds to ask their parents to buy a $100 ticket then run around in latex and lip sync? No way.

I don’t keep people around me that aren’t family. You don’t get to stay. Unless you’re eating at the table with us, you’re not part. We eat together, we cry together, we live together, we die together. Everything that we do is for each other, and we care for another.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

My father opened a restaurant. It’s so amazing… it’s so freaking delicious, but I’m telling you I gain five pounds every time I go in there.

My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

Treat your children like the blessings they are or don’t have them at all.

My son is becoming me – just a silly, silly prankster guy.

My parents met when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. They were both active in the civil-rights movement.

The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

I love being American, and I love family. I love having a family, and I feel so blessed, and I feel like God gave me exactly what I wanted, so now I have to do the right thing in God’s eyes also. Just follow what God wants me to do.

I did have two dads; one was a socialist, and one was a capitalist. I really decided I would rather be a capitalist.

Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is dishonor in being slave-owners.

It would have been difficult to have an ugly daughter.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

Brad and I have never wanted our kids to be actors, but we also want them to be around film and be a part of Mommy and Daddy’s life and for it not to be kept from them, either. We just want them to have a good, healthy relationship with it.

When I was young, my brother David and I were farmed off to foster homes, and I spent time in orphanages. My father abandoned us. Here’s the most important person in my life, and I never met him.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

Surely wisdom will come as we listen to learn from children, parents, partners, neighbors, Church leaders, and the Lord.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

For me, the opposite of scarcity is not abundance. It’s enough. I’m enough. My kids are enough.

When I was a teenager, my biggest lessons came from Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, George Strait, Rascal Flatts and Brad Paisley. I learned so much from opening up for those artists, and it also taught me how to treat your opening acts and make them feel like they’re part of a family, not just a tour.

For a long time I was scared I’d find out I was like my mother.

Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!

I’m the proof – you can’t throw away tradition.

If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.

Marriage and family are ordained of God. The family is the most important social unit in time and in eternity. Under God’s great plan of happiness, families can be sealed in temples and be prepared to return to dwell in His holy presence forever. That is eternal life!

The greatest legacy one can pass on to one’s children and grandchildren is not money or other material things accumulated in one’s life, but rather a legacy of character and faith.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

Clearly this is a tough economic time, and a lot of families are hurting. So when we talk to parents, we talk about small changes for kids and things that don’t cost extra money. Like adding water and eliminating sugary drinks and sodas. That’s going to save money right there. Or adding a few more vegetables.

Without Cambodia, I may never have become a mother. Part of my heart is and will always be in this country. And part of this country is always with me: Maddox.

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one – it’s the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky – in the big cities, too, for that matter.

You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul.

I delayed my father’s funeral because of cricket.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

I was very worried about my mother, growing up – a lot. I do not want my children to be worried about me.

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men… We are who we are because they were who they were. It’s wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

I was baptized by my father when I was 4 years old.

Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

Of all nature’s gifts to the human race, what is sweeter to a man than his children?

I used to carry my father’s Bible and put it on the pulpit so he could preach.

No matter what, I always make it home for Christmas. I love to go to my Tennessee Mountain Home and invite all of my nieces and nephews and their spouses and kids and do what we all like to do – eat, laugh, trade presents and just enjoy each other… and sometimes I even dress up like Santa Claus!

I was totally dominated and revered my father. I admired everything he did. He was a great sports person. He loved me. I was his only boy at that time, before my brother Billy came along.