I was 21 in 1968 so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies in the West anyway would have seemed absurd in 1968.

I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion if they can find out what it is.

I count religion but a childish toy and hold there is no sin but ignorance.

For that again is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.

Teach a child what is wise that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful that is religion!

Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be true.

We must respect the other fellow's religion but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

Krishna children were taught that in the spiritual world there were no parents only souls and hence this justified their being kept out of view from others cloistered in separate buildings and sheltered from the evil material world.

My relationship with 'Pollyanna' is a very personal one because Pollyanna got me through my childhood.

There's a really unique relationship between a single parent and their child. Marriages so easily break up. There's kind of this temporary deal about marriages. That's one of the things that makes it stressful and that's something that's nonexistent in a parent-child relationship.

I have a great relationship with animals and with children. I get to their level. I try to see the way a child looks at the world it's hugely different.

We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.

It's not that you know when a relationship doesn't work and there are issues you have to somehow work it out if there are children involved.

How do you build a relationship when you've hardly shared a word but suddenly share a child? How do you love a daughter you don't see for nearly two years? When does she become your daughter? How does she become your daughter?

My relationship with Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm reaches far back into my childhood. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales. I even saw a theater production of 'Tom Thumb' during Advent at the State Theater in Danzig which my mother took me to see.

The most convincing argument against early parenthood is that you are in a relationship that is likely to fall apart before that child grows up.

It's about strengthening the relationship and the bond of parent to child.

I'm not a good father and they're not children any more the eldest is in his fifties. My relationship with their mothers broke down and because of what the law was they went with their mothers and were imbued with their mothers' morality in life and they were not my people any more.

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then only a few feet away in the cookbook section just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?

I can't cultivate a relationship with my child if it's between takes. I tried that on a movie and realized 'This is not going to work.' It will work some of the year but not 12 months a year.

Even as a child I had a strong relationship with yearning and desire. And loss. Those things spoke to me.

I think at some stage I would love to have another child. I would love to settle into a relationship that was really important to me. I actually am not good at the balance at that.

I know children regress after vaccination because it happened to my own son. Why aren't there any tests out there on the safety of how vaccines are administered in the real world six at a time? Why have only two of the 36 shots our kids receive been looked at for their relationship to autism?

A grandchild is a miracle but a renewed relationship with your own children is even a greater one.