I think my mother, more than anyone, knew the importance of inspiration. If it was occurring, you had to use it.
I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn't really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you're trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.
My mother is brilliant but emotional and very much gregarious and connected to people. My father was brilliant but focused and driven and very narrow-casted.
I consider myself lucky to be an only child because if I had other siblings, my mother would not have been able to take me to every audition and be so supportive of my career.
The truth is that at age 19, I was a teenage mother living alone with my daughter in a trailer and struggling to keep us afloat on my way to a divorce. And I knew then that I was going to have to work my way up and out of that life if I was going to give my daughter a better life and a better future, and that's what I've done.
My natural mother passed away from cystic fibrosis when I was a toddler, so I feel a great deal of empathy for people who are struggling with disease.
My mother taught me to read in part by reading me Walt Disney comics, and I never stopped.
My mother has often said that the issue of women is the unfinished business of the 21st century. That is certainly true. But so, too, are the issues of LGBTQ rights the unfinished business of the 21st century.
Feeling strong is important, and to feel in your body is a vital part of being a woman, regardless of whether you're a mother or not.
I remember my mother had this deck of cards that her mother had given her and that she passed on to me. It was a gypsy tarot deck that I used to carry everywhere.
I have lovely memories of Los Angeles in the 1930s. I came down to live with my mother's cousin and they invited me to come and go to junior college for a year.
Nothing in life prepared me for the way I felt about being a mother. Until then, I sort of felt like a blank sheet of paper. I was always trying to second-guess myself, to be what others wanted me to be.
My family and friends were definitely the key to my recovery. One thing that I do suggest is that anyone dealing with a life-threatening illness like cancer choose a point person for people to call to find out how you are doing - a sister, brother, mother, father, daughter, son, or close friend.
I have a characteristic since my childhood. I don't like living together with my mother, sister, or friends at my home. I have always preferred to be alone and independent and lived according to that.
My wife, she is so good. She was a famous singer - had a show in Carnegie Hall, did a big city tour for RCA. Then she made the mistake of marrying me. The next year, another tour, but the third year, she had Mario and said, 'Either I'm a mother or a singer.'
My mother made a choice. And when I was younger, I judged her for making that choice. Then I got older and got to be an adult, and I realized that was the ultimate sacrifice that any parent and any mother could possibly make.
I had children very young. You go through a period of immense guilt about being a working mother.
When I was young, I thought I wouldn't be a good mother. Now I think I would be, but I'm too long in the tooth.
When I was 13 or 14, my mother used to gift me books that I was dying to read. Those are my most memorable birthday gifts.
I had a lot of guilt as a single mother trying to raise a child. I had to go to work and Jeffrey was screaming that he didn't want me to. You have to give yourself permission to let go of the guilt.
The mother cannot expect her daughter to understand the mysteries of housekeeping without education. She should instruct them patiently, lovingly, and make the work as agreeable as she can by her cheerful countenance and encouraging words of approval. If they fail once, twice, or thrice, censure not.
I love whimsy. My mother was a word person, a real quipster. She was famous in the 1950s for being a contester in Utah: 25 words or less. My bicycle, our hi-fi... in 1959, she won $15,000 from Remington-Rand for writing about a shaver. She was a farm girl from South Dakota.
I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
I knew the full 'Judy Garland Carnegie Hall' double album set at age 2. And then my mother wondered why I was gay. I was like, 'Are you nuts? You would make me get on the table to sing Judy Garland songs and you're upset?'
The fact that a woman is attached to her professional life should not prevent her from being a mother.
When I was a little kid, it was not uncommon for a cousin or an uncle, before they would even say 'Hello,' to gush, 'You know, your mother's brisket is just incredible; it's so good.' That was an inspiration for creating a love song in that well-worn terrain of the relationship between a Jewish boy and his mother.
When I was seven and we lived in New York, I ran away. I took my dog and started out across the Brooklyn Bridge... I didn't get very far... It's rather difficult to run away in your mother's high heels.
My brother arrived some months after my father left. Um, and he ah, was thus eight years younger than me and it was um, you know, it was such a time that my mother probably had people wondering was it his.
My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them.
People think that I popped out of my mother's womb singing 'Chasing Pavements'.
I remember my childhood as a horrible time. My mother says that nothing so horrible ever happened to me as the things that I remember.
My first published novel was 'Mother of Demons,' which is simply 'The High Crusade' standing on its head. Poul Anderson placed his medieval human heroes in a futuristic alien setting; I placed my futuristic human heroes in a bronze age alien setting.
Mother Nature and Father Time have not been happy with me.
My mother was really courageous.
I had a fantastic mother who taught me self-confidence.
My mother's incredibly giving, almost too giving at times. And, my dad is a real logical person. He's got logic for every situation. They've been married for 24 years, so there was that stability, also. I really learned to think on my own at a very young age.
