“If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you'll be going, 'you know, we're alright. We are dang near royalty.'”

“There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.”

“Growing up in an Italian family, you use a harsh tone and 10 minutes later everybody forgets about it.”

“I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini.”

“I really appreciate family. I really can't imagine life without them!”

“Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.”

“I would rather start a family than finish one.”

“The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.”

“You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.”