I have always believed in trying to be a good person and giving to the world, and treating others in a just, kind, merciful way.

I don't believe that raising my voice in song is going to be pleasing to a God who is sitting upstairs somewhere, waiting to be pleased.

I was in fact anxious about whether I would be any good at being a father. And then I met so many people who had been good parents under difficult circumstances, and I felt inspired by them.

When you banish the dragons you banish the heroes.

Suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated people can be frighteningly alone. Intelligence does not help in these circumstances; brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.

Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity. We depend on the guarantee in our children's faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates that fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do. Loving our own children is an exercise for the imagination.