My kids say if there's any family dinner that doesn't result in somebody crying, it's not a good dinner. They cry because it helps relieve them of a guilt or some onerous emotional burden. It's like a family tradition.

My life is my statement and I try to be true to myself and thusly to other people. Whatever my failings are, they are human and I try to perfect it each day.

The conundrum of free will and destiny has always kept me dangling.

There's too many people in the world.

Oh, for God's sake... get a life, will you?

This is my saddest story: In grade school, they would have us open our Valentine's cards and read them out loud. I always sent cards to myself because nobody else did.

Montreal is a very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, erudite, educated, glorious city today. But it wasn't quite that way when I was growing up there. There was a lot of anti-Semitism. And I had to deal with that in an area of the city that had very few Jews.