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.

I had a one-year-old son. How will my failure or success limit what he becomes? I was trying to write screenplays. It doesn't pay very well until you sell one. I was poor.

The key to sitcom success is miserable people. If you see a happy couple, it's just gone, like when Sam and Diane got together on Cheers.

My purpose is to have American Jews look away from the success story with which they've cheered themselves up, and to have them remember the classical tradition, whatever it is.

Success came to me in my late 20s. I started touring when I was a teenager, so I had already seen the good, the bad, and the ugly side of the music business. Plus, setting up my own record company taught me a lot.