The millennials were raised in a cocoon, their anxious parents afraid to let them go out in the park to play. So should we be surprised that they learned to leverage technology to build community, tweeting and texting and friending while their elders were still dialing long-distance?

When I realized that my big dream was going to come true - 'Night Shift' was a success, 'Splash' was a success, I got the job to do 'Cocoon' - suddenly, I was underway. And I knew my name was rising up the lists. I was going to have a career. I was going to be able to direct movies until I screwed it up.

I start every morning at 7 or 7:30 in the same place - my little office where it's dark and cozy - with a cup of the same really strong black coffee. It's my little cocoon. There's no phone or fax or Internet. And no music.

The digital world has been in a separate orbit from our medical cocoon, and it's time the boundaries be taken down.

Marriage is a custom brought about by women who then proceed to live off men and destroy them, completely enveloping the man in a destructive cocoon or eating him away like a poisonous fungus on a tree.

The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory.

I'm lucky to have a great support system in my friends and some of my family. If you have those people that you trust, go ahead and fall back into them and let them be your hammock and cocoon and let them embrace you.

One of the great upsides to a national book tour is the chance to break out of television's cocoon and interact directly with the American people.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

If you help a chicken out of an egg, most of the time that bird will die. If you help a moth out of a cocoon, it'll die because they don't go through that struggle and maturation. I can give you a fish for the day and you'll eat a day, but if I teach you to fish, you'll eat for a lifetime. Maybe even start a business.

Art and literature should help us to get out of our mental cocoons.

"We are in the womb of materialism, in a cocoon of illusions of fear, where slaves are born.

"In a cocoon of individualism. In an authentic bunker of skepticism, nihilism, apolitical non-conformism. Protecting himself from the radiation of mass hysteria and the herd instinct of the matrix system.

Never say, "O Lord, I am a miserable sinner." Who will help you? You are the help of the universe. What in this universe can help you? What can prevail over you? You are the God of the universe; where can you seek for help? Never help came from anywhere but from yourself. In your ignorance, every prayer that you made and that was answered, you thought was answered by some Being, but you answered the prayer yourself unknowingly. The help came from yourself, and you fondly imagined that someone was sending help to you. There is no help for you outside of yourself; you are the creator of the universe. Like the silkworm, you have built a cocoon around yourself. Who will save you? Burst your own cocoon and come out as a beautiful butterfly, as the free soul. Then alone you will see Truth.

I'm lucky to have a great support system in my friends and some of my family. If you have those people that you trust go ahead and fall back into them and let them be your hammock and cocoon and let them embrace you.

This may sound funny but as much as the 'Today' show matured me it also was something of a cocoon. I'd been happy there. I never went into the boss's office and pounded my fist on the desk saying 'Give me more money! Give me a prime-time show!'