When I am playing baseball, I give it all that I have on the ball field. When the ball game is over, I certainly don’t take it home. My little girl who is sitting out there wouldn’t know the difference between a third strike and a foul ball. We don’t talk about baseball at home.

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.

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. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

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

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

I want to go and go, and then drop dead in the middle of something I’m loving to do. And if that doesn’t happen, if I wind up sitting in a wheelchair, at least I’ll have my high heels on.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

We want to play the AFC Cup every year.

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.

There weren’t a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn’t have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do.

I will fight in many weight divisions.

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

When I look at acting careers that I really admire, I see that it’s been a precise decision-making process for these people. They make decisions based on what they love, and they do only the things that they are passionate about. They play only characters that they can’t stop thinking about.

Cleveland fans are awesome.

I can remember earning £5,000 a game playing for Hibs at the end of the Seventies. They let me commute from London, train on the Friday and play on Saturday. That lasted until my friends at the Inland Revenue decided to take two-thirds. That wasn’t very entertaining for me.

My children love Maleficent’s voice, so they always make me do it at home.

Pilots take no special joy in walking. Pilots like flying.

I believe that my parents did wonderful things for us.

Basketball is my passion, I love it. But my family and friends mean everything to me. That’s what’s important. I need my phone so I can keep in contact with them at all times.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

Christmas is the perfect time to celebrate the love of God and family and to create memories that will last forever. Jesus is God’s perfect, indescribable gift. The amazing thing is that not only are we able to receive this gift, but we are able to share it with others on Christmas and every other day of the year.

Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, and not as the government dictates. Let us extend choice, extend the will to choose and the chance to choose.

I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: ‚Checkout Time is 18 years.‘

Football (soccer) is a matter of life and death, except more important.

For an Ethiopian mother, if you have a chubby kid, it means you’re doing something good.

When the party gives me a responsibility, I must do it with complete dedication. God has given me the ability, which I utilise to its optimum.

I think about my own sons and my own daughters, and I’m sure that many parents are concerned about what their children are exposed to.

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’m just glad I was able to return to some of that innocence and beauty I had as a child when I started my own family, and my children brought me back some of that spirit.

I’m first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can’t say why I’m one.

My folks ain’t graduated from high school or nothing like that, so we always had to struggle in the family – and I come from a big family.

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.

I never had to choose a subject – my subject rather chose me.

Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don’t run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.

I’ve been very lucky. I come from a very close family.

My mama never wore a pair of pants when I was growing up, and now that’s all she wears. It was so funny for me when I first started seeing Mama wear pants. It was like it wasn’t Mama. Now I’ve bought her many a pantsuit because she just lives in them.

Michelle and I don’t want anyone telling us who our family’s doctor should be – and no one should decide that for you either. Under our proposals, if you like your doctor, you keep your doctor. If you like your current insurance, you keep that insurance. Period, end of story.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart.

Football is big business – you can’t get away from it. But you have to separate that side from the playing.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

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.

Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

There’s no political point worth my son’s life.

A family looks for ways to support and inspire one another.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

You can be passionate about anything.

Whether I’m running on the beach without my shirt or whether I’m going out with my kids or going to church or going out to dinner – I don’t choose to insulate myself in engaging in real life. Hence, the public kind of almost knows me as much through my real life that they see through the rag mags.

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.

When I’m out on the football field, I have so much confidence in what I’m doing.

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

I’m committed to the fight game.

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.

I love football and the intensity of football in Liverpool, this is what is very good for me.

There was the time I bought three cars in the span of three or four weeks. It was crazy; it wasn’t greedy. It was mine, my girl’s, my mom’s. I got Benzes for my ladies. But I felt crazy. You have to understand I come from a world where we’re very modest. But that’s not greedy. That’s nice, right?

An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame – Southern Methodist University game and doesn’t care who wins.