A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.'

There's always a version of me who is the narrator. And I make myself look better than other people.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.