"It is our responsibility to find God in someone who is different from us. I think that God basically says, 'I created diversity on purpose, and it is your responsibility to figure out how to make it work.'"

"The most successful families embrace and elevate their family history, particularly their failures, setbacks and other missteps."

"Let your kids pick their punishments. Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around. It's easier, and we're usually right! But it rarely works."

"I definitely subscribe to the idea that 9/11, to use an overused phrase, was a wake-up call. There was a year-long national teach-in on Islam - everyone read books and suddenly talked about Islam, and that was very productive. But there's no doubt that moment has passed."

"In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power."

"This is the highest wisdom that I own freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew."

"Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."

"People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid."