The purpose of the Seder to my mind is to inspire conversations with your family about the human drama and hopefully transmit values to the next generation. I've always felt like this could be better.

It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers and I grew up in a very funny conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.

When you look at a family if you have a family that never interacts with each other never has strong conversation with each other never has disagreements nine times out of ten you have a very cold family and they're not going to be at the end they're not going to be close.

I grew up in a family where the women were just nuts. They didn't stand around in cardigans making polite conversation while they chopped tomatoes.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself and cannot be made by anyone else.

I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.

Universal peace sounds ridiculous to the head of an average family.

Some of the most important conversations I've ever had occurred at my family's dinner table.

I believe that my own Christian faith does indeed make universal claims.

It is from the traditional family that we absorb those universal ideals and principles which are the teaching of Jesus the bedrock of our religious faith. We are taught the difference between right and wrong and about the law just punishment and discipline.