I think any activity you have your kids in, you’re all trying to live vicariously through them. And you’re jealous of the kid that’s naturally more talented or has the facility, the body, the genes, or the God-given talent. People get jealous of that.

Historically, the family has played the primary role in educating children for life, with the school providing supplemental scaffolding to the family.

If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.

I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.

I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.

Genius, when young, is divine.

Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There’s plenty of movement, but you never know if it’s going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.

Wisdom I know is social. She seeks her fellows. But Beauty is jealous, and illy bears the presence of a rival.

In my divorce, I stood up and said to my ex-wife, ‚Hey, I messed up. This had nothing to do with you. I didn’t understand what marriage was. I cheated. I was wrong. We couldn’t fix it; it got worse. I stepped away because I didn’t want it to get any worse. You’re the mother of my kids – I don’t want to hate you.‘

My problem was my inability to spend much time at home. I thought my family was secure, so I went running around everyplace else. I guess I had more of an effect on other people’s kids than I did my own.

I have a son, who is my heart. A wonderful young man, daring and loving and strong and kind.

But now, being a parent, I go home and see my son and I forget about any mistake I ever made or the reason I’m upset. I get home and my son is smiling or he comes running to me. It has just made me grow as an individual and grow as a man.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

No parent is perfect; we all can look back and think of things we could’ve done to help our children be better prepared for adulthood. And sometimes it’s best to admit it to them and encourage them to learn from our mistakes.

I want to thank God, obviously for the health, for the talent He’s given me, for my family who supports me, for the things that basketball’s taught me on and off the court. For the people that I’ve been able to meet through the game of basketball.

The one thing I want to leave my children is an honorable name.

I’m not great at bedtime stories. Bedtime stories are supposed to put the kid to sleep. My kid gets riled up and then my wife has to come in and go, ‚All right! Get out of the room.‘

Train up a child in the way that he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Parents and teachers, learn to listen, then listen to learn from children.

My children love Maleficent’s voice, so they always make me do it at home.

I feel like I’m the kind of guy that would have kids before getting married. The first thing would be kids.

Irrespective of whether you have talent or not, one has to work hard. Just being talented doesn’t mean anything; you can end up wasting it before you realize.

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn’t want them to lose friends. He is his family’s hero.

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

Do I worry about being in the public eye and raising kids? Yeah. Any situation you’re in, you’re gonna worry about raising kids. But it’s champagne problems, too. There are people who can’t feed their kids.

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.

I can dance to just about anything.

A career is born in public – talent in privacy.

Someone said to me, ‚If fifty percent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no talent and should give up, what would you do?‘ My answer was then and still is, ‚If a hundred percent told me that, all one hundred percent would be wrong.‘

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

I’d like to think that I’m a calm and sweet person. I tend to be very playful at home with my children, but in life… we have to fight our battles – our work battles, our political battles, our personal battles – and we’re focused.

I think being able to age gracefully is a very important talent. It is too late for me.

Men weren’t always happy for me. It was very challenging to watch a woman be so successful.

If I’d been born ugly, you’d never have heard of Pele.

My mother was a full-time mother. She didn’t have much of her own career, her own life, her own experiences… everything was for her children. I will never be as good a mother as she was. She was just grace incarnate. She was the most generous, loving – she’s better than me.

I hate what I look like on TV, and I want to look better, and nothing makes the mothers more jealous.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

There’s no political point worth my son’s life.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.

With the amount of money I have, it’s difficult raising children the way I was raised.

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

I want my kids to see me as Dad, for God’s sake, not a television personality.

It took Simone a long time to understand why people want Daddy’s autograph. I’d tell her, and my wife would tell her, too, ‚People see Daddy in the movies, and they are excited to meet him.‘ But she couldn’t really grasp it.

Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman’s normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

The thing I want more than anything else? I want to have children. I used to feel for every child I had, I would adopt another.

Sincerity makes the very least person to be of more value than the most talented hypocrite.

I remember thinking quite logically that I didn’t want to spoil my children with wealth and so that I would create a foundation, but not knowing exactly what it would focus on.

My mother is a singer, my sisters all sing, my uncles are incredible singers and guitar players, so it’s just kind of been like my habitat.

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.

The greatest service that can be offered to children who show personality traits or inclinations that might not be understood by the adults around them is to allow them to express their own unique humanity.