I like the relative literacy of at least some of England. I mean, I didn’t come for the food or the weather!
The strengthening of faith, I think, is the ultimate goal of organized religion altogether.
Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat – it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner with a better sense of balance.
Any community that remains an abstraction is an easy target for prejudice and cruelty, but any community that becomes fully humanized is much harder to treat in that way.
I found it very comforting to see that there is no such thing as a completely normal family. People find their way through whatever the differences may be.
I spent years thinking I had to make a choice between being true to myself and being with a man and not having a family, and trying to live something of a lie and being with a woman and having children...
I had always wanted to have children, so it caused me a lot of grief when I was younger, and I had supposed that gay people could not be parents.
I was in fact anxious about whether I would be any good at being a father. And then I met so many people who had been good parents under difficult circumstances, and I felt inspired by them.
Parenthood always involves recognizing your child as separate and different from you.
And I found out about the wonderful world of sign language. I suddenly realized: If we as a society recognize Jewish culture, gay culture and Latino culture, we must recognize that this is a coherent culture, too. I think deafness is a disability for social constructionist reasons.
I think you can’t deny that because the cochlear implant exists, the signing world is shrinking.
I think a lot of the time people assume that their values are universal. And they don’t understand which aspects of their values are actually universal and which aspects are very specific.
I love to communicate, and I love music. That’s why I always thought not being able to hear would be a tragedy.
Some autistic people may emerge from their condition, but nobody knows when and why.
There is no question that abuse, drugs and exposure to violence at home can exacerbate someone’s criminal tendencies enormously. But there are many, many criminals who don’t come from that background.
The more gay people can tell our stories, the more other people will accept gay people.
I think it’s up to the parents to determine whether what they’re doing is consigning their child to difficulty. It’s not as though they were crippling their children after they were born.
With children who have never said a word, parents tend to assume, for better or for worse, that there isn’t any language there.
I would certainly not want my child to be schizophrenic. I wouldn’t want him or her to be a criminal either. If, on the other hand, I had a deaf child, it would help that I have developed a real admiration for Deaf culture.
There is neither a cure for nor a way to repair autism. There is no implant like there is for the deaf.