That a friendship ends doesn't mean it was weak from the outset; that it ends says nothing about its importance.

Parenting advice is mostly useless because every family is uniquely its own; artistic advice is mostly useless because every artist works in their own way. Thus, figuring out how to balance the two has an intense specificity.

With respect to parenting, biological age is not, for men, the concern it is for women.

Parenting is love, sure, but it's as much about receiving love as it is giving it. Parenthood is a kind of vanity.

I think that in the cultural imagination, motherhood has a primacy that fatherhood just doesn't; and that's not to say that there aren't many fathers who are active and engaged and for whom that is their life's passion. But somehow, in the imagination, there's something different about maternity.

By a considerable margin, my family's largest-ever financial expenditure was the adoption of our two sons.