The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.

That married couples can live together day after day is a miracle that the Vatican has overlooked.

Sex education may be a good idea in the schools, but I don't believe the kids should be given homework.

Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.

My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood, but it didn't because parenting can only be learned by people who have no children.

Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.

Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.

Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries.

No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

Nothing I've ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Old is always fifteen years from now.

Parents are not interested in justice, they're interested in peace and quiet.

People can be more forgiving than you can imagine. But you have to forgive yourself. Let go of what's bitter and move on.

Men and women belong to different species and communications between them is still in its infancy.