Sometimes it's easier to show than it is to tell.

I want to keep meeting new people, enlarging my circle of friends. I have great friends now... really good people. But I'm always ready for what comes next.

My father was a very unhappy person, very sarcastic, and my mother was very nervous and worried about what people thought. They weren't monsters, but it wasn't a good childhood.

In my next life, I want to be tall and thin, parallel park and make good coffee. But for now, I have lots of stuff to work out in my life, but I'll have that until the day I die. I want to write more books.

At age 12, I was put on tranquilizers when I should have gotten help. There was nothing major and awful, I just didn't feel my family was supportive and emotionally generous.

Sometimes it's easier to show than it is to tell.

Normally, I name my characters after famous comedians.

I made the choice long ago to write about real life. And life is both serious and funny.

When my father would yell at me, I told myself someday I'd use it in a book.

I try to be careful because technology changes so much over the years. But some things don't change. Kids and parents have disagreements, kids try to manipulate, parents try to sit down with rules and regs. That part never changes.

I deal with unhappy marriages a lot. I've never been married, I'm single.

I'm very lucky. I'm very fortunate that my books have never gone out of print - none of them.

I tried to write with someone else once before, but it was not successful.

None of my characters seem to have had sex yet - I haven't written about that. And I wouldn't want to deal with what's happening in Oregon - the school shootings.

I didn't expect to be doing a whole bunch of Amber Browns. And because it was just one book, and the father had moved away, I didn't realize I was going to have to deal more with shared custody, divorce and all those issues.

I wish I had had my books when I was a kid, I do.

The books are funny and sad, and that's what people respond to.

I think my books talk about kids learning to like and respect themselves and each other. You can't write a message book; you just tell the best story you know how to tell.

The Court's legitimacy arises from the source of its authority - which is, of course, the Constitution - and is best preserved by adhering to decision methods that neither expand nor contract but legitimize the power of judicial review.

We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.

If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.

I still think that movies are amazing; I respect actors and directors.

The better your audience, the more energy you have, and the more energy you have, the better show you do. The better show you do, the more they love it, and the more energy they give back to you.

I actually made an effort to reject acting, to shove it out of my body, because I didn't want my kids to have an actress as a mother-to have, like, a silly person.

Climate change is no longer a doomsday prophecy its a reality.

I'm not going to pretend I'm some saint, because I'm not.

Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Life is short. Focus on what really matters most; you should change your priorities over time.

I feel incompetent to perform duties... which have been so unexpectedly thrown upon me.

We don't know what we don't know about Ebola. We think we know it's a virus, but is it mutating? Can it be spread by airborne?

Once or twice in the height of 'Happy Days' excitement, which had more to do with Henry Winkler as The Fonz than ever had to do with me, we were kind of like a boy band for a year or so, and we would go out on personal appearances and feel the limousine rocking, and the grabbing at your clothes and people trying to steal your cap.

I think there is an enormous appetite for great roles for women. You can see that clearly with things like 'The Hunger Games.'

The market groups and demographics said, 'Teenage guys don't read magazines.'

I don't really want a film as a present; you can get me a diamond ring.

God created the family to provide the maximum love and support and morality and example that one can imagine.

I think it is very possible that my deeper character is not very English.

Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn't, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' In every possible sense.

Mistrust the person who finds everything good, and the person who finds everything evil, and mistrust even more the person who is indifferent to everything.

I do try to stay open and stay as present as you can be.

An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.

The inspiration you seek is already within you. Be silent and listen.