Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories.

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.

We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future.

Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.

Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil.

Having children is like living in a frat house - nobody sleeps, everything's broken, and there's a lot of throwing up.

No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

There really are places in the heart you don't even know exist until you love a child.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.

Your children are not your children, they come through you, but they are life itself, wanting to express itself.

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

I want my children to have all the things I couldn’t afford. Then I want to move in with them.

One thing I had learned from watching chimpanzees with their infants is that having a child should be fun.

Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children's most primitive fears.

If you can control your behavior when everything around you is out of control, you can model for your children a valuable lesson in patience and understanding...and snatch an opportunity to shape character.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.

Perhaps it takes courage to raise children.

If you are a parent, open doors to unknown directions to the child so he can explore. Don't make him afraid of the unknown,give him support.

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

We spend the first 12 months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next 12 months teaching them to sit down and shut up.

Everything depends on upbringing.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

We never know the love of the parent till we become parents ourselves.

To bring up a child in the way he should go - travel that way yourself.

Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.

I love to read about the exploits of technical mountain climbers, but I've never done any vertical climbing.

The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.

You pretty much can't get away from bacon or whiskey in the South. Put a doughnut in it and you'd be good to go.

The thing I like about 'Nashville,' it just happens to be about musicians, and all the music is practical, meaning it's performed at a concert or during a rehearsal.

Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to.

I come from Toledo, Ohio, a town that has been hurt badly by the shift of the automobile business towards Japan. And yet I remember how the car workers lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in. My father was a car salesman, and I remember how we lived. I remember how modestly we lived.

My hits are not hits.

I am an employment hyena. I am happy to make a meal of what the lions leave behind.

Science fiction I've always been a fan of.

The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists.

I have the distinction of being called a media whore by Courtney Love.

To get enough of the teachers we need, teaching has to be a great job where talented people are supported and rewarded.

I always used to pretend to be different characters - cowboys, that sort of thing. I used to think that the Indians lived over the mountains that I could see out of my bedroom. As I grew up, I started to understand that acting was actually a craft, and there was no question about it, that was exactly what I was going to do.

If you are good to people, they reciprocate with good behaviour.

The more we express thanks, the more gratitude we feel. The more gratitude we feel, the more we express thanks.

I don't want to brag, but I do more homework on the course than any other announcer. I chart the greens to get all the breaks. I walk down into the greenside bunkers. I walk into the fairway bunkers to see whether a player can reach the green from them.

If Iran does not change its policies, it won't be able to integrate into the international community and will become even more isolated than it is now, which likely will have a negative impact on the Iranian people.

No one can be said to be happy until he is dead.

The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence.

I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions.