“It’s absolutely imperative for the parents and the typical kids to have time by themselves, to go out to dinner or even go on vacation while someone else cares for the autistic child.”

I usually have my protein at lunch and my carbs at night – I don’t mix protein and carbs.

When I was a little girl, rocking my little dolls, I remember thinking I would be the world’s best mom, and so far I’ve done it.

If you give us a safe vaccine, we’ll use it. It shouldn’t be polio versus autism.

I’m the comedic girl next door and a lot of fun.

The University of Google is where I got my degree from.

People don’t see this side of me. They don’t know I read, like, 800 million spiritual books. Lately I am just really getting into a lot of spirituality.

You totally value and respect your body as you get older.

I didn’t have to work out before 35 but now I have to.

I guess now that I think back, I used to play priest and be a funny priest. I don’t know, I grew up in such a Catholic family that I kind of liked to test the boundaries a little bit and I think I had fun watching my mom laugh.

I’m so scared girls look at my breast implants and think, ‘To get boys, you need big boobs.’ I tell them, ‘Don’t get it done. Those fears go away. You develop other insecurities, but breasts aren’t one of them.’ I want to get them half-size.

I tried a few times, unsuccessfully, to lose weight. It wasn’t until I joined Weight Watchers that I was finally able to do it. I went to meetings and my son came with me. The best thing was that I could eat what I wanted and still lose weight. Slow and steady, I was getting my pre-pregnancy body back.

A talk show is difficult because the formula is always the same: there’s a host and there’s guests. Really what you can change is only so much. So, I don’t have any pre-interviews, which forces real conversation.

Those outside of autism need to understand this is an epidemic and we need more government funding, insurance coverage and education reform.

Craziest thing I’ve done for love is getting married. I think it’s crazy. I think it’s crazy, crazy, crazy. I’m never going to say I wouldn’t do it again but I have to make sure it’s love and not settling for the ‘I have to do this by a certain age,’ which is kind of what I did.

For a seriously autistic kid, the best prognosis might be getting into a mainstream school without being too much of a shadow. For a moderately autistic kid the best prognosis is full recovery.

I look at autism like a bus accident, and you don’t become cured from a bus accident, but you can recover.

I had a very sparse comic upbringing – not because I was being whipped into reading Chekhov and Dickens, but I read Asterix on holidays when I was a kid, and Tin Tin was featured, I remember, for a few years.

When we work to end childhood hunger, we are giving our love to kids who need it so much they will never ask for it.

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife’s a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.

I certainly was a geeky kid myself, but to me, math and science were always these magical things- powerful tools you could use in incredible ways.

And then I got into sports and gave my guitar to my brother Jeff who was just a little kid at that time.

Put in hours and hours of planning, figure everything down to the last detail, then what? Burglar alarms start going off all overthe place for no sensible reason.

I can go into a playground of kids that don’t know anything about Christianity, lead them to the Lord in a matter of, just no time at all, and just moments later they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of God, because they’re so open. They are so usable in Christianity.

As a small kid, I came across things like these early Edward Gorey books in department-store bookstores. These were these really unusual objects to me. I didn’t know how they fit into the comic world or into newspaper comics.