I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution - they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.
Most kids don't get to go their parents' wedding.
That thing, 'You must stay together for the kids', is out of fashion but is right. It's not arguing parents that children don't like, it is having one parent.
I've had many nicknames over the years: V, Nessa, Nessy Poo, Nessy Bear and Van. Only my parents call me Van, though, and I hate it. I get embarrassed.
I had a hard-scrabble childhood with my parents. I have a lot of baggage. To come down to the footlights and accept the audience's affection inside a Broadway theater - that didn't come easily to me.
There couldn't be better parents than mine, loving yet strict. They disciplined with love. A child without discipline is, in away, a lost child. You cannot have freedom without discipline.
I promise you that I did not become an addict because of anything to do with the behavior of either of my parents. Everybody has to make their own choices.
I feel like I'm really blessed and lucky that I have a very good social life outside of the gym, and I have a really amazing family. My parents are so supportive. I have a younger brother and two younger sisters, and they're really awesome. So I feel like I get the best of both worlds.
I wasn't the high-school play queen or anything. And my parents would let not me act until I graduated from college.
The great model of the affection of love in human beings is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children.
You know, we were worried that in the UK, there's no anarchy on kids TV. When we grew up kids TV was very anarchic and it was about stuff that your parents would probably object to, if they got to object. And it's gotten very safe.
I was born in Connecticut. But my parents brought my sister and I to L.A. when-Hollywood, actually, when i was 6 months old.
In America, people rarely stay in the town where they grew up, rarely stay in close proximity to their parents throughout their lives. You rarely find parents in their old age being taken care of by their children.
But we are not going to stand by and go back to allowing people with preexisting conditions to be discriminated against, go back to the situation where people can be thrown off their insurance simply because they become seriously ill or you can't get on your parents' insurance after the age of 20.
I have three older brothers, and we all have different combinations of parents. My father was the best man at my mom's first wedding! And my brother's mother - my dad's first wife - is the sister to my mom's first husband's second wife. So my brothers are both stepcousins and stepbrothers. It's very '70s rock.
I don't think parents always know where their children are going or what they are doing, what they are up to.
Christmas Day itself hasn't always been great. My parents went abroad when I was very young, and I went to boarding school. We had a few Christmases before that - I remember a big sack of presents and Mummy cooking goose.
Before I was a mom I used to think that parents who worried about their kids watching MTV were just clueless. Now that I'm a mom, I see what the fuss was all about!
I mean you got to thank your parents for giving you the right genes.
Ours was a loving, nurturing household, but, at the same time, my parents' goal was to make all their children self-sufficient.
I have parents come up to me and say, 'I don't know who you are, but my kid wants his picture taken with you.'
Parents who wonder where the younger generation is going should remember where it came from.
I grew up in a city. My parents would think there was something wrong with America if they knew I was secretary of agriculture.
I believe there ought to be school choice, so that parents can choose within the public school system.
My parents aren't the demographic for a lot of things I do. If I did a stand-up show, and I saw 62-year-old Pakistanis in the crowd, I'd be like, 'I'm gonna bomb.'
My parents are my backbone. Still are. They're the only group that will support you if you score zero or you score 40.
Some kids go walking in the mountains, but I just went to the cinema. So when I told my parents I wanted to be an actor, even though this wasn't normal for Arab kids or anyone in the town, they were sort of expecting it and were very supportive.
A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind.
Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for their children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.
Once I took a bus from my home in Maryland to Philadelphia to live on the streets with some musicians for a few weeks, and then my parents sent me to boarding school at Andover to shape me up.
I grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania, where my parents raised German shepherds - we had about 30 dogs at any given time.
I think the deepest problem is between my parents and me. I just don't know if it will ever be the same.
My parents taught me honesty, truth, compassion, kindness and how to care for people. Also, they encouraged me to take risks, to boldly go. They taught me that the greatest danger in life is not taking the adventure.
However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.
I owe a lot to my parents, especially by mother and my father.
The Food Network and the Cooking Channel have so many viewers. And, because there's no violence, some of that audience is children. So, I think we have a responsibility to educate parents how to produce healthy meals for their families.
