My style icon really for my whole life has been my mother.
When there is a voice in a piece of music, we tend to focus on the voice. That is probably something from when we were babies and we depended on hearing our mother's voice.
I'd have to say I'm most proud of my mentoring camp that I do in Dallas every year for one hundred boys from single-parent homes. I was raised by a mother who was a Sunday school teacher and a father who worked hard. Together they taught me to give back.
I have different hats; I'm a mother, I'm a woman, I'm a human being, I'm an artist and hopefully I'm an advocate. All of those plates are things I spin all the time.
My mother tells this story that when I first went to school, I thought I was going to help the teachers. I didn't realise I was going to get educated.
Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there.
I left New York after my mother died and, rather aimlessly, had settled in Istanbul for a change of scene. It was a rather dramatic gesture on my part, since I'd lived in New York for 20 years, but I felt I needed something different - the escalating expense and pressure of New York had begun to weary me.
I started cooking from watching my mom. My mother was a really, really great cook.
I gave three years of my life to take care of my dying mother who had Alzheimer's disease. Being there for her every need for three years might have looked codependent but it wasn't because it was what I wanted to do.
If a studio is going to offer me the opportunity to invite my mother and grandmother and all my friends to visit me free of charge in Thailand, I'm going to take that opportunity.
The person earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 isn't going out to eat at restaurants. They're not taking piano lessons. They're not going to the gym or the yoga studio. They're not sending mom flowers on Mother's day. What good is this person in the economy? If you raise it to $15 an hour, they're doing all of those things.
My mother was a cleaning lady all her life.
Above all, there is Mother. She taught me how to love, how to have respect for other people.
My daughter Gabby very kindly once said that she thinks I was a better mother because I was doing a job I loved. I now think guilt is a universal part of being a mother. I used to think it was Jewish-mother guilt but now I think it is working-mother guilt.
I know I have a very self-destructive tendency since my mother died, I have got to be honest.
I wanted a good relationship with my mother, and I realized I had a choice: Either I could spend all my time angry that she didn't give me the hugs I thought I needed, or I could understand that she hugs differently. It's not a spread-open-the-arms, 'come here' hug. She hugs by sheltering me from her worries.
A church without women would be like the apostolic college without Mary. The Madonna is more important than the apostles, and the church herself is feminine, the spouse of Christ and a mother.
I just ultimately wanted to be a mother. I love children.
I don't consult anyone - not my mother, not my father, anyone - about my work. And I must add that neither Dad nor Mom interfere in my work.
My mother spent a month in a Swiss hospital after a terrible ski accident.
My mother, sister and I watched through the windows as my father gambled.
My grandmother and I followed my mother here, to a house a block north of Hollywood Boulevard but a million miles away from Hollywood, if you know what I mean. We would hang out behind the ropes and look at the movie stars arriving at the premieres.
My mother always wanted to give back.
People think it's a terrible tragedy when somebody has Alzheimer's. But in my mother's case, it's different. My mother has been unhappy all her life. For the first time in her life, she's happy.
A boy is not free to find a partner of his own as long as he must be the partner to his mother.
My mother was there every day of the production. You know what? My mother and I are so close, she really understands the fact that I am 18 and I am maturing. I guess I am not your average 18 year-old.
I wanted - and still want - to tell my mother's story. She fled Stalin's army in 1944, leaving Latvia, which was to be occupied by the Soviets for the next 50 years, and arrived to the U.S. when she was 11.
I have an almost religious zeal... not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up.
Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother.
I always want to do - take everything and take it to the next step. I don't want to just keep doing something the same ol' thing. Obviously, I could have wrote 'Mother' 20 times and made tons of money and be playing gigantic arenas and whatever, but that's not really what I want to do.
I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle - a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own - and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.
My mother always told me, 'Don't make women cry.'
I was focused on building things from an early age. When I was about 3, our toilet broke, and my mother was ready to call the plumber. I told her I would fix it and asked her to get my Richard Scarry book 'How Things Work in Busytown.' Between the picture of a toilet and the text she read to me explaining how the parts worked, I fixed it.
My mother was my best friend and confidante.
My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike. She said little, especially when my father or the men who worked for him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy for the miners.
Christopher Walken and Nathalie Baye played my parents so well that I really thought I was in my living room at Christmas. My mother couldn't have been played more correctly.
