You never know when some small thing will lead to a big idea. Travel is very inspirational - but it's in the ordinary that I find my themes of love and work and family.

We really were a very musical family. Father managed to buy us a small pump organ and I just loved this instrument.

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.

I draw from my family and my friends and I feel like that small-town person. The achievements the materialistic possessions have really become to mean less. They mean nothing.

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home family a clan a small town a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born or we are peripherally aware of it.

Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan conservatives have succeeded by adhering to a platform that rests firmly on three legs: smaller government faith and family and a strong national defense. These three legs do not merely represent a political coalition they are three necessary components of a strong and secure America.

As a small business owner for the last 15 years when I think of what truly changed my life it was my faith a strong family my mom did a really really good job of encouraging me in very clear and discernible ways.

The faith religious believers have in God is small compared to the faith people put in politicians knowing how many times they have been disappointed in the past but still insisting that this time it will be different.

Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words or in exact and priggish argument.