Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.

Men who have a thirty-six-tele vised-football- games-a- week-habit should be declared legally dead and their estates probated.

What makes people laugh? . . . It's a happy marriage between a person who needs to laugh and someone who's got one to give.

Parenting is a negative thing. Keep your children from killing themselves, or anyone else, and hope for the best.

Success is outliving your failures

I've always felt there are two things a woman should never do after the age of thirty-five: stand in natural light and have a baby.

Authorities say brain cells may shrink, but they don't necessarily die. Frankly, I am cheered by the fact that something is shrinking. I'd be even more thrilled if what was shrinking affected my dress size, but you can't have everything.