Write verse not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry then don't by any means mother it but try your hand at verse.

It doesn't work if the bad guys kill his mother's uncle's friend's neighbor's pet dog. You've got to make the stakes high.

Like any other people like fathers mothers sons and daughters in every land when the issue of peace or war has been put squarely to the American people they have registered for peace.

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

As I pass it I feel as if I saw a dear old mother sweet in her weakness trembling at the approach of her dissolution but not appealing to me against the inevitable rather endeavouring to reassure me by her patience and pointing to a hopeful future.

My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale New York society woman best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book 'Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers' - this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford's wire hangers look like pool noodles.

My father was a farmer and my mother was a farmer but my childhood was very good. I am very grateful for my childhood because it was full of gladness and good humanity.

We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?

I get whatever placidity I have from my father. But my mother taught me how to take it on the chin.

I don't think children's inner feelings have changed. They still want a mother and father in the very same house they want places to play.