“My kids always perceived the bathroom as a place where you wait it out until all the groceries are unloaded from the car.”

Every puppy should have a boy.

For years, my husband and I have advocated separate vacations. But the kids keep finding us.

When you look like your passport photo, it’s time to go home.

A grandparent is the only baby-sitter who doesn’t charge more after midnight – or anything before midnight.

Encourage independence in your children by regularly losing them in the supermarket.

I was trampled to death by a man who believed his luggage would be the first piece off. If he were an experienced traveler, he would know that the first piece of luggage belongs to no one. It’s just a dummy suitcase to give everyone hope.

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

A grandparent will help you with your buttons, your zippers, and your shoelaces and not be in any hurry for you to grow up.

Time. It hangs heavy for the bored, eludes the busy, flies by the for young, and runs out for the aged.

The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

It is my theory you can’t get rid of fat. All you can do is move it around, like furniture.

No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed.

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.

He is a writer for the ages, the ages of four to eight.

One of the greatest, smartest things I ever did was give my kids Angie as their mom. She is such a great mom. Oh, man, I’m so happy to have her.

If you love people you criticize them, and if you don’t love them you don’t criticize them, you let them go to hell, don’t you? To help any kind of friendship, your marriage, your children, you criticize because you love.

Kids need love the most when they’re acting most unlovable.

The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires.

Any love involves loss, and that’s the risk you take. And the greater the love, the greater the loss. I certainly feel that now with the woman I’m with, and the children that I have. But whatever the course may be, this time together is extraordinary.

Children wish, vulgar men hope and real men act immediately after considering all the alternatives.

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. How does it feel to be a problem?