Good parents give their children Roots and Wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what's been taught them.

The happiest moments of my childhood were spent on my grandmother's front porch in Durham, N.C., or at her sister's farmhouse in Orange County, where chickens paraded outside the kitchen's screen door and hams were cured in the smokehouse.

Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition, but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.

My sister, with her ratty red-highlighted hair and her linen pajamas and her combat boots—how could she possibly worry about being possessed by a goddess? What goddess would want her, except the goddess of chewing gum?

In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.

Kids will keep it real. If I've ever had in my life a great anchor, it's them. They get in your head, 'don't get too famous.' If you think you're really famous and think you're really hip, go hang out with your kids for an afternoon. That's about as earthbound as it's going to get.