It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: 'Why not try writing a novel?' partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother's family.
I live for my work, apart from my family who come first. And I live to tell stories and pretend to be other people, it's something I've been doing since I was 3 years old. Maybe it's because I'm intrinsically bored with myself, and I find other people more interesting. The more different they are, the bigger the challenge.
Family, to me, is most important, and I can't wait to have one of my own, but I am not going to rush into it. I don't want to get a divorce. I want to take my time, do it once and get it right.
I don't know about you, but my girlfriends have been my girlfriends forever, and they're my sisters and my family.
Every time I was playing basketball, I felt sick to my stomach. I didn't realize that feeling was having to leave my family - having to leave my sister, who can't even communicate with me when I'm gone.
Every time I've talked about my family in the past, people have ended up getting upset. So I said to my friends and family: 'I shan't refer to you at all, and there's nothing for you to get upset about. There's the deal.'
The Food Stamp Challenge, which challenges higher-income families to live as if they are on food stamps, estimates that a person on food stamps has a budget of about $1.25 per meal. In other words, a family on food stamps must buy an entire meal per person for less than the cost of an average cup of coffee.
I think there's a down-to-earthness with Midwesterners and with people from the Midlands - which is where my family is from - in Ireland.
I come from a family where people are physically affectionate. Hugging and kissing comes naturally to me.
If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.
I didn't have any of those good assets to have successful teenage years. It was hard. And what saved me was definitely my whole family. I knew where I was coming from and where I was going to.
Putting on a movie is like going to war - for me, at least. It's all about time; time is money, and we don't have it. So it's all about getting to know each other intimately quickly. You are with family members that you like or don't like, but you can't leave them because you're stuck with them.
I have a tight family group that's really important to me. I don't want to work all the time.
With the royal family, you don't want to see them as people because it takes the sheen off. They're distant; you can idealize them. But there's room to have compassion for people and see them as human beings. Just because they're royalty, it doesn't mean they don't love or feel loss or feel pain.
If anything, 'Friday Night Dinner' is quite mean. All these pranks that we play on each other, there's a lot of hitting and slapping and jumping at each other trying to scare each other. But underneath it all it is a family, so we all love each other.
In the past 40 years, the United States lost more than a million farmers and ranchers. Many of our farmers are aging. Today, only nine percent of family farm income comes from farming, and more and more of our farmers are looking elsewhere for their primary source of income.
Books were in my family - books were my family.
You've simply got to go on and on with your family and friends and tell them how much you love them because you never know whether they'll be there tomorrow, do you?
Our family life was certainly not intellectual.
The American people know what's necessary to get this economy moving again. It's fiscal discipline in Washington, D.C. and across-the-board tax relief for working families, small businesses and family farms.
I'm very pleased with being a part of the Bean Pole family. It's a relationship that makes sense to me. I'm very pleased to have my name associated with Bean Pole Jeans.
I've managed to dodge the curse. Not all my family have. Of course, music helped me - music is all about civilization, about something worthwhile. It's all about ideas.
When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.
I go back five generations in Jamaica. My dad grew up in Port Royal, and my mom grew up in Kingston. My family is from the country like West Moreland and also in Manchester. I've been there countless times. As far as cuisine, there's not really much that comes out of Jamaica that's on a plate that I don't like.
I was actually the one who decided to move to LA. Mom and I were driving on Sunset Boulevard during one of our trips back to see her family, and I said, 'Can we just stay?' So we did.
I would vote for the man who's lived life, who's done different occupations, who's been out in the real world and struggled to make a living, struggled to raise a family, struggled with life as it exists. So I'd vote for experience, honest experience.
I guess my religious faith sustained me more than anything else. Family is also very important. If I didn't have children, it would have been too difficult. Even if you are strong, you still need people who would support you all the way.
In the investigation of a neurotic style of life, we must always suspect an opponent, and note who suffers most because of the patient's condition. Usually this is a member of the family.
I've got a good family to support me, so I'm grounded in that way.
Your most important friendships should be with your own brothers and sisters and with your father and mother. Love your family. Be loyal to them. Have a genuine concern for your brothers and sisters.
Every year, like a good Catholic, I wait for Christmas. Putting up the lights, decorating the tree, making sweets and then unwrapping gifts on Christmas morning... it's a tradition my family has followed since I was very little.
Leaving America means renouncing your citizenship, moving out of the country and leaving family and friends behind. You can retain your citizenship if you like, but you'll still be away from loved ones and still be paying taxes. You lose all the good stuff about America and have to keep all the bad stuff.
Few people know that I grew up in Germany and that my family still lives there.
When you're shooting a movie, it's two months of your life usually. You don't really have time to see anybody else. Your friends are put on hold while you're shooting, and what you have is the family that you create on set.
Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.
I know my father believed and my mother believed in and supported the suffrage movement, and I remember my mother taking me to suffrage meetings held in the home of a Quaker family that lived not far from us.
