“The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.”

“As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by "survival of the fittest.”

“And of course, when you see your brother in the toilet bowl...there's a little voice that say, 'I wonder where he would go...'...if it hadn't been for his head...”

“Suddenly, this romantic agony was enriched by a less romantic one: I had to go to the bathroom. Needless to say, I couldn't let her know about this urge, for great lovers never did such things. The answer to "Romeo Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?" was not "In the men's room, Julie.”

“In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage.”

“I guess the real reason that my wife and I had children is the same reason that Napoleon had for invading Russia: it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“I’m supposed to figure out if the glass is half full or half empty,” I told her.Without a moment’s hesitation, in a split second, my grandmother shrugged and said: “It depends on if you’re drinking or pouring.”