“When the going gets tough, the tough make cookies.”

I worry about scientists discovering that lettuce has been fattening all along.

The hippopotamus is a vegetarian and looks like a wall. Lions who eat only red meat are sleek and slim. Are nutritionists on the wrong track?

I remember thinking how often we look, but never see … we listen, but never hear … we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place. It has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity and laughter to come alive.

Have you any idea how many children it takes to turn off one light in the kitchen Three. It takes one to say What light and two more to say I didn’t turn it on.

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the ‘Titanic’ who waved off the dessert cart.

Don’t confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.

One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child’s name and how old he or she is.

Onion rings in the car cushions do not improve with time.

How come anything you buy will go on sale next week?

Some emotions don’t make a lot of noise. It’s hard to hear pride. Caring is real faint – like a heartbeat. And pure love – why, some days it’s so quiet, you don’t even know it’s there.

Good kids are like sunsets. We take them for granted. Every evening they disappear. Most parents never imagine how hard they try to please us, and how miserable they feel when they think they have failed.

My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance.

Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn’t even in the same neighborhood. No one has ever gotten a religious experience out of removing burned-on cheese from the grill of the toaster oven.

I read one psychologist’s theory that said, “Never strike a child in your anger.” When could I strike him? When he is kissing me on my birthday? When he’s recuperating from measles? Do I slap the Bible out of his hand on Sunday?

Children make your life important.

I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.

Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.

A man’s reading program should be as carefully planned as his daily diet, for that too is food, without which he cannot grow mentally.

And chicken is boring. Chefs see it as a menu item for people who don’t know what they want to eat.

Good food and good eating are about risk.

Our movements through time and space seem somehow trivial compared to a heap of boiled meat in broth, the smell of saffron, garlic, fishbone, and Pernod.

Don’t touch my dick, don’t touch my knife.

You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.