The senseless killing of 20 children and their teachers and principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School was not part of God's grand plan. It was a thwarting of God's plan. It was the misuse of human freedom.
Human relationships used to be easy: you had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it's all gone sideways.
One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That's how the human species has done as well as it has.
So what it boils down to, in my humble opinion, is that we need to support the arts in schools, and at every other level in the education of children.
Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder.
Three of my children are medical doctors, they know at least a hundred times as much about your body as my grandfather knew, but they don't know much more about soul than he did.
I love gay Mardi Gras in Sydney, which is a big parade, a big march that thousands and thousands of people participate in. And there's one little group... well it's not little, it's got hundreds of people marching, and they're all very sweet, middle-aged and elderly people who are the parents of gay children who are out and proud.
I go to Malawi twice a year. It's where two of my children were adopted from, and I have a lot of projects there that I go and check up on and children who I look after. It's sort of a commitment that I've made to this country and the hundreds of thousands of children there who have been orphaned by AIDS.
Working with the children on 'Matilda' has been a joy. They don't do this professionally - their sense of discovery is instinctive, and the challenge for us adults is to keep that going in ourselves when we're doing it for the fiftieth or the hundredth time. To my delight and amazement, it hasn't gone stale - we discover it freshly every time.
Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.
My father and his brothers never mentioned to their English wives and children that they were Jewish. Being Hungarian was exotic and foreign enough to begin with, and so long as they were not asked, they found it easier, from 1919 on, to let the matter drop.
Children are supposed to help hold a marriage together. They do this in a number of ways. For instance, they demand so much attention that a husband and wife, concentrating on their children, fail to notice each other's faults.
Ages of experience have taught humanity that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society.
One of the things my mom used to do - I don't know why she chose me, but she chose me out of her six children to take to the African-American church that was in the town that we lived in Springfield, Missouri. And we would go to the church, and we would sit in the back row, and we would listen to all of the spirituals in the hymns.
We have the capacity to make sure that every mother has pre-natal care. Yet, we don't do it. What is it about America? It says we don't value children and families. We are hypocrites.
My children without a doubt are my greatest accomplishment. If I did nothing else I would feel just having and raising them would be enough. The rest is icing.
Children see things very well sometimes - and idealists even better.
As the idealized mother, I might choose Irene Dunne as the mother in 'I Remember Mama' who strives and not just cooks and scrubs for her children, but who also acts as her daughter's literary agent.
Children's books deal in idealized worlds, so they're a document of how our notion of ideal worlds has changed over time.
Home is where children find safety and security, where we find our identities, where citizenship starts. It usually starts with believing you're part of a community, and that is essential to having a stable home.
