“Family and friends and faith are the most important things in your life and you should be building friendships.”

My son, George, has been a bad, bad boy! Right, George?

One thing I can say about George… he may not be able to keep a job, but he’s not boring.

I think a lot of our problems are because people don’t listen to our children. It is not always easy. They’re not always so brilliant that you want to spend hours with them. But it is very important to listen to them.

George is the best little dishwasher in Texas.

Value your friendship. Value your relationships.

You know, for one glorious half hour, I was the mother of the president-elect.

I’m taking a vow not to advise.

It seems to me I spent my life in car pools, but you know, that’s how I kept track of what was going on.

I decided I ought to pick a project that would not be controversial, that would not really cost the government a lot of money.

If more people could read, write, and comprehend, we could be much closer to solving so many of the other problems our country faces today.

The Titanic was built by professionals. The Ark was built by volunteers.

Never lose sight of the fact that the most important yardstick of your success will be how you treat other people – your family, friends, and coworkers, and even strangers you meet along the way.

I think togetherness is a very important ingredient to family life.

I hate abortions, but just could not make that choice for someone else.

I may be the only mother in America who knows exactly what their child is up to all the time.

I love talking to people, but what I really love is to feel you’re doing something instead of sitting home and twiddling your thumbs.

So that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.

I’ve had a lot of experience building things, organizing things, a national scholarship program.

I know that New York is big, there are huge buildings, but in fact, it’s quite small and contained.

Big Ben just kept building up. It ended up coming off the field. It kept taking over. Superman kept taking over Clark Kent and you just never saw who Ben Roethlisberger was any more.

I live in an apartment building built in 1925, and it hasn’t been heavily renovated, so I feel very much connected to that time and what went on in that place.

A good 80 percent of the vault is still physical and another percentage of it, 20, 25 percent is mental.

I’ve been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

My mother, for example, has the pleasant notion that my day consists of nodding graciously to the rustle of starched curtsies and a chorus of respectful voices bidding me good morning.