Your children make it impossible to regret your past. They're its finest fruits. Sometimes the only ones.

Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.

Stereotypes fall in the face of humanity. We human beings are best understood one at a time.

A finished person is a boring person.

People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.

Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.