I encounter a lot of prejudice and a lot of darkness. I have to negotiate constantly through situations that are uncomfortable or difficult or strange.

In coming to an appreciation of the Mormon Church, one of the things that has been most compelling to me is the Mormon understanding of family, which extends beyond the general injunction to be fruitful and multiply, and addresses the permanence of love relationships into eternity, and embraces the sanctity of having children.

There is a false moral imperative that seems to be all-around us that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. And I think that's very misguided. It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles.

If you are married and you go off and have an affair with someone, if you are a husband who does that, it may potentially hurt your wife enormously. But it seems to me likely also to compromise your marriage. That seems to me to be a harm.

At the end of the day, will God be interested primarily in whether I have been kind and helped others, or in whether I was baptized and how?

I love to communicate, and I love music. That's why I always thought not being able to hear would be a tragedy.

I'm sure that if we had enough sophistication, someone could look at what my changes in brain structure were as I came to feel more deeply in love.