With all my heart, I plead with the Latter-day Saints to live honestly with the Lord in the payment of tithes and offerings. I plead with youth to establish this habit while you are still young and to resolve to continue with it all the days of your lives.

Let every mother realize that she has no greater blessing than the children who have come to her as a gift from the Almighty; that she has no greater mission than to rear them in light and truth, in understanding and love.

The gospel is not a philosophy of repression, as so many regard it. It is a plan of freedom that gives discipline to appetite and direction to behavior.

Study a foreign language if you have opportunity to do so. You may never be called to a land where that language is spoken, but the study will have given you a better understanding of your own tongue or of another tongue you may be asked to acquire.

The most important people to please are your family.

The reason why I found acting is because my father passed away. He passed away really young. I was going to go to med school. My father's dream was that all of his kids become doctors. I realized in school I didn't like it. When he died, it was like a wake-up call. Life is too short to do something you don't want to do.

I am not only the person who wrote and sold a novel while raising a houseful of biological and foster children; I am also the person who wrote a horrific young adult novel that never sold and gave up on a foster child I couldn't handle - an experience that still haunts me.

The first thing, when I got the money, I knew I would support somebody. And the person I supported was my family. Because we were really in debt with the money. And - so I gave to my father this suitcase full of money. And he couldn't believe it. And that was something very special.