My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.

What many economists fail to understand is that poor people are no less concerned about improving their lot and that of their children than rich people are.

To be five years old is to be surprised by life. I'm amused by my children's awe at quotidian things - a toy helicopter, a bubble bath, the visible tentacles on a plate of calamari. And I'm envious of their ability to attain something I often can't: a state of transcendence induced by art.

As parents we're not nearly as computer literate as our children are.

As a native Washingtonian, I am well aware that childhood obesity is a real problem in our nation's capital.

We should never permit ourselves to do anything that we are not willing to see our children do.

Being a child star is great. It's being a former child star that sucks.

I'm just lucky. I do have very clear memories of childhood. I find that many people don't, but I'm just very fortunate that I have that kind of memory.

Puritanical attempts to cure society by taking toys away from children are hypocritical and futile.

They are always very lax about putting restrictions on violence for children's movies, which I think is much more harrowing than sexuality for children.

You can be childlike without being childish. A child always wants to have fun. Ask yourself, 'Am I having fun?'

My mother and I never got along, not even when I was a child.

I was a sidelines child: never class president, never team captain, never the one with the most valentines in my box.

Not all children have the anchor of a strong family.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

If I had stayed in Belfast, my life there wouldn't have as easy as it was in Scotland. I see the strain on the people who stayed. Always worrying about the safety of their children.

I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.

I am like a child when it comes to gizmos and gadgets.

Childhood is so important. Without a loving one, you're vulnerable throughout your life. We're all the things our parents are - the good and the not so good. Thankfully, I have a wonderful wife who's a brilliant mother.

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?