If you write satire, the guilty pleasure these days is that there's just so much material about. On the other hand, if you have a family it can be depressing.
The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.
I'm very pro-American - my entire family escaped poverty in Italy because they rightly believed in the American dream.
In my family, we can't just sit and be together. We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or something. A larger task. Some way of being with people.
If somebody gave you several thousand dollars and nothin' to do but write, would you be a writer then? Would you tell your stories, your family's stories, then?
Characters in a book are very much like personalities divvied up within a family. In the end, it all averages out to a sort of overall averageness.
The great thing about coming from where I come from - Liverpool and my family - is that we're very close. I have a great relationship with my siblings and their kids.
I've got a great family and a beautiful house. I feel very lucky as far as my lifestyle is concerned. I'm not really interested in fame and all its trappings.
Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.
Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact the family brings up baby by being brought up by him.
For centuries my father's family lived on Britain's biggest tidal river, the Severn, on which there was a huge trade with the interior, and through the Port of Bristol with America.
The welfare culture tells the man he is not a necessary part of the family; he feels dispensable, his wife knows he is dispensable, his children sense it.
But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, 'How can I combine career and family?'
Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else.
I was not supposed to be in any way a liberated person. I was a female born in the '40s in a patriarchal family; I was supposed to marry and make everyone around me happy.
I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.
Growing up, there wasn't much emphasis on being nice or naughty. As a family, there wasn't much discipline. It was more relaxed at home, which I'm grateful for.
Comedy has always been important in my family. If you got in a good joke at the dinner table, it meant more than almost anything else.
I have been called a nun with a switchblade where my privacy is concerned. I think there's a point where one says, that's for family, that's for me.
