All my life I've had a weight problem. As a child, I loved to eat. I would hide from my mother and drink whole cans of condensed milk in my room.
We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful.
Everyone who knows me will know the truth, which is that my children come first in my life and that I would never harm any child.
In too many cases, the moms, the dads, the sisters and brothers of children with cancer must stand by a hospital bed and watch helplessly as this horrible disease consumes the life of an innocent child.
A fine book, in the perfect setting, when there's all the time in the world to read it: Life holds greater joys, but none come to mind just now.
When I was 11, I realised that I did not have to live the life my mother had: school, marriage, children, apartment, summer house.
We can always choose to perceive things differently. You can focus on what's wrong in your life, or you can focus on what's right.
I trust that when people meet, we meet for a transcendent reason, and that the challenges we face in life are always lessons that serve our soul's growth.
When I was a child, I felt at times that I had been born into an insane asylum, that much of human life appeared to be an insane asylum. It was bewildering.
When I found out I was pregnant, my mother said, 'Don't separate your life, the life that you're going to make with this child, from the things that you are and what you want to do.'
I have known Farley Mowat all of my life, from reading his books as a child to becoming a close friend of his over the last three decades.
A 1990 Gallup poll found that 77 percent of Americans polled said abortion was the taking of human life. I agree, and believe that taking the life on an innocent child is unjust.
To me, I'm the epitome of what a ghetto child is: I was raised by a single parent; I stayed in apartments my whole life; I don't think I've ever cut the grass.
Of course, losing my father was traumatic. I was an only child. But from the time my father died, my general theme in life has been to turn adversity into opportunity.
Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.
I learned a lot from my Mom. My favorite lesson: remember there is no such thing as a certain way to parent and to remember that you are learning along with your child - it's ok to make mistakes.
I can't promise that every child with learning differences will become a novelist, but I do think all children can become lifelong readers.
I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.
There's a stigma that guys hate romance and hate love, but that's not true. Look at 'Iron Man.' There's a whole through-line plot about his relationship with Pepper, and everybody loves it.
Ooh, I'd love to be in a movie with Meryl Streep or Martin Scorsese. There are so many different things I want to do, maybe like a possessed child or an evil something... I don't know!
I'd love to adopt, but having a daughter, Daisy, who's in the middle of her teens, I'm now thinking: Is this a time to start all over again or is this a time to realise those child-rearing years are over?
