“One's family is the most important thing in life. I look at it this way: One of these days I'll be over in a hospital somewhere with four walls around me. And the only people who'll be with me will be my family.”

“I used to be a classic workaholic, and after seeing how little work and career really mean when you reach the end of your life, I put a new emphasis on things I believe count more. These things include: family, friends, being part of a community, and appreciating the little joys of the average day.”

“I had the good fortune of having a happy, closely knit family.”

“As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.”

“My kids say if there's any family dinner that doesn't result in somebody crying, it's not a good dinner. They cry because it helps relieve them of a guilt or some onerous emotional burden. It's like a family tradition.”

“I never did quite fit the glamour mode. It is life with my husband and family that is my high now.”

“Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.”

“I love where I'm from. I don't live there because of the circumstances, but all my family is there. It's what's inside, it's not what's outside that determines the culture and the feeling.”

“There was a great complexity to my father. He was a devoted family man. But, in the same breath, he simply was not suited to an anchored life. He should have been somebody who had a backpack, an old map, a bit of change in his pocket and that was it - roaming the world.”