Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course.

When I was a kid, I was surrounded by girls: older sisters, older girl cousins just down the street... except for an older boy named Vito who threw rocks. Each year I would wish for a baby brother. It never happened.

Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.

I love the most the students with troubled lives.

As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

Love stories are probably all I've ever been able to write or want to write.

Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.

The roundness of life's design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves.

When I was a kid... I needed to belong.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.

Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course.

I think the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes. Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.

Young actors often don't think of the consequences of doing nudity or sex scenes. They want the role so badly that they agree to be exploited, and then end up embarrassing family, friends, and even strangers.

On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in forgoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family.

We're parents first, and once you have kids, everybody knows that you have priority lists. Number one is your family and everything else just kind of finds its place.

I have a project at HBO and one at the Family Channel coming that are being looked at. Aside from that I am not doing much more than playing golf and some skiing.

I didn't tell anybody about my plan because I was convinced my family or friends would stop me. I didn't think much about what would happen afterwards.

You know raising a family in the lifestyle of a professional athlete can be very difficult.

I love to see my family together. That's what life is about. It's about family.

Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.

It was an idea we had when Al was in the Senate - to organize and moderate an annual conference that would look at government policy through the lens of the family to help identify ways that the family can be supported and strengthened.

Even though we were all celebrities to a certain extent, we all looked at each other as family.

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction.

I love my family.

I have other obligations now - the show, my family, my life... though I know that without my sobriety I wouldn't have any of those things.

When they were small and my wife really had no other responsibilities, except taking care of the family and all of us, it wasn't that big a deal. It was fun. Hey, we're going to Moscow. We're going to Italy. We're going to Toronto. We're going to New York.

I miss my family, and I like being a tourist when I go back.

I'm not in the business of becoming famous. And that's the advice I give to younger aspiring actors. Work onstage and do the little roles. In the end it's not important to be seen. It's important to do. There's a lot of disappointment in this business, but my family keeps me grounded.

The last three decades have seen the collapse of the family wage system.

I have continued systematically to study the Book of Mormon and Bible to understand even more deeply what God expects of me and my family while on this earth.

When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.

Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.

When I said I was going to audition for a film, I got a hearty laugh from all my family.

And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.

I mean, I would never want to do anything to hurt my family, but then again I would never want to do anything to hurt myself. And I think they go hand in hand.

After a hundred years the son of the King then reigning, who was of another family from that of the sleeping Princess, was a-hunting on that side of the country, and he asked what those towers were which he saw in the middle of a great thick wood.

I was on Oprah's show recently talking about the people who impacted me the most. One was a teacher and one was my soccer coach. I didn't even go into my family, who had the most influence.

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.

He said there is 80 of us, ready to come down and the next thing I knew is that Jo Brown dashed in and said your family has already moved and you have to move, the boat is ready to take you out. I didn't have time to ask, even ask a question.

We expect teachers to handle teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and the failings of the family. Then we expect them to educate our children.

I had an amazing experience working with great people. I had a great family, a typical family with drama in certain areas, and that's pretty much everywhere in everyone's life.

I come from a family of losers, and I've rejected my family as something I don't want to be like.

I think togetherness is a very important ingredient to family life.

It's the sense of what family is at the dinner table. It was the joy of knowing mother was in the kitchen making our favorite dish. I wish more people would do this and recall the joy of life.