My parents grew up during the space race, and I think they imagined the future would be us living on moon bases and everyone has rocket shoes.

It is our duty, as parents and as teachers, to give all children the space to build their emotional strength and provide a strong foundation for their future.

Your job is not just to do what your parents say, what your teachers say, what society says, but to figure out what your heart calling is and to be led by that.

I always like to spend time with the kids, especially with kids who need help. For them and for the parents, to see their smile is always nice.

In New York, I have a photo of my parents on their wedding day in 1947. They're beaming at home plate in Houston's Buffalo Stadium. I love the photo because my dad is smiling. He didn't smile much in his later years.

If you have a famous parent, you know that being famous doesn't make you superior to anyone else. It just means people smile at you more. Everyone was fawning all over my father, but of course, the way you look at your parents when you're a teen is often with a... more critical eye.

Each one of us can do a good deed, every day and everywhere. In hospitals in desperate need of volunteers, in homes for the elderly where our parents and grandparents are longing for a smile, a listening ear, in the street, in our workplaces and especially at home.

Both of our children are adopted, and my wife and I didn't go out of ways to find kids that looked like us. We were just happy to have some kids. And people tell me all the time that they look like us, and that's because they learn to smile and laugh and move their head a certain way from studying their parents' faces.

I've covered a lot of ground geographically and emotionally and for years I lost my connection with my family. But the best comfort you can have, whether you are on the phone or sitting there in the living room with them, is with your parents, and to me family has always meant protection. When you smile you get a smile back, unconditionally.

God blessed me with two unbelievable parents, and I am just like both of them. I have the smile and charisma of my mother and the big heart of my mom, because she wants to save the world and help the world, so I am just like her.

When I was a kid, we'd go to the movies, and my parents would reach out to everyone around us in the theater, most of whom could barely afford the movie ticket. They'd hand out popcorn and Milk Duds, strike up conversations with them, lend shoulders to cry on, learn their names, and smile at everyone.

My mom's one of the toughest ladies I know. I've seen her lose both her brothers, both her parents. She's been through a lot, and to see her get up every day and put a smile on her face, that shows nothing but strength.

Children learn to smile from their parents.

My parents divorced when I was born, and my mother is a political science professor, like a feminist Mormon, which is sort of an oxymoron.

For whatever reason, I didn't succumb to the stereotype that science wasn't for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.

To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, 'How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?' The honest answer is, I don't know.

My parents were mourning the death of my sister. She was killed in a car accident before I was born, and I didn't know she existed until I was 13 or 14 years old. I knew I was growing up in a house where people were angry and sad.

'I Know You Care' is about my dad. And I haven't seen him for a long, long time. And my parents divorced when I was really young. And I guess I just wanted a - it was my way of saying that I wasn't bitter or angry anymore. I was just sad and just felt like something was missing.

My experience, with both my parents, is that grief has a lot of down, sad things, but I was also really emotionally raw, in the first year after each of them passed. Flowers smelled more intensely, my relationships were hotter, and I was more willing to risk. I was going for it a lot more. I was 'unsober' and I wasn't playing by my rules.

It's a sad moment, really, when parents first become a bit frightened of their children.

Since it's based on my parents, it's more emotionally close to me than some of my more surreal plays. And then I like the balance of the comic and the sad. It should play as funny, but you should care about the characters and feel sad for them.

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?

I think a lot of people think that my parents' deaths is why I write such sad songs, but that's not true. Those songs may just be the woman I am.

A very sad moment for me was when my parents separated - a lot of crying, 'It's tragic, we're now a broken family, blah blah blah blah blah' - although my psychological problems stopped. I actually felt healthier.