My dad left when I was a little boy and I grew up with my mother's family. There were foundations in the U.S. where Jewish people got together and sent money to Cuba, so we got some of that. We were a poor family, but I was always a happy kid.
I've got to say my mother is the most important woman in my life, and not just because she is a 'Scotsman' reader.
My mother loved fashion. She was a beauty and had enough sewing skills that she could re-create the looks in magazines. She also was enormously charismatic.
I didn't cook that much as a kid. My mother was cooking, and I was her helper. We made dishes together.
I always felt like my value was much more in my intellect than it was in my appearance, and so that's what I spent time cultivating. And some of that I get from my mother, some of that comes from the schools that I went to, and some of that comes from probably insecurity.
My mother is brilliant; she's the best person in the world and keeps me grounded.
I think I would love to have dinner with Gandhi; Jesus Christ; Mother Theresa; Ingrid Newkirk, the president of PETA; and Madonna.
My parents were divorced when I was three, and both my father and mother moved back into the homes of their parents. I spent the school year with my mother, and the summers with my dad.
My family is Abenaki Indian on my mother's side. My father's side of the family is Slovak, and we also have some English ancestry.
My mother says that after I first visited the home of the man I later married, she knew it was serious when I told her, 'Mum, he has more books than me!' So, books are at the very heart of my life.
I want to feel I have the energy I will need as an older mother having a younger baby. It's really important that when I'm 51, and my daughter is 10, that I feel I can still run around and do things with her, and feel the energy of a slightly younger woman having their kids at school.
I was definitely a tomboy. My mother liked to dress me differently, but it was her loss when I came home with mud in my hair every day. I've always been more comfortable with guys; I don't know why.
When I was a kid, my mum had a lot of Dumas books in the house, and she's from France originally. My mother had one particular Dumas book that was a family heirloom - this old, beat-up 1938 edition of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' in French. She came to America after losing her parents in World War II as a little kid.
Doing what we can to repair the world was instilled in me from an early age. I will never forget my siblings and me knitting squares for blankets to be sent to the troops during World War II. This was an inspiration from my mother.
You know, I put my little brother in the movies and he's still in the pictures. My mother makes me put him in the pictures.
My mother played the piano and my father the violin, I can remember my dad teaching me how to waltz; I had my feet on his, my mother playing the piano, and my husband will tell you the lessons weren't very successful.
I'd rather be the protector than the protected. I'm naturally the protector - being a mother and having a famous family. You have to navigate when it's right to protect.
Whenever I've had a problem with any female in this entire game, I will say your name... I'm going to say your government. I'm going to look it up. I'm going to say your mother's name, your father's name, your kid's name. I want you to know that I'm talking about you.
My mother did play classical piano, not that well. And actually, my father sang with the big bands - he sang with Bob Crosby's band - but he had to give up show business when his father died. He had to come back to Montgomery and take over the furniture store.
My mother came from a generation that did not want nannies. She had her first child at 24 and her last - me - at 42.
My parents separated soon after I was born, so I left Helsinki when I was a year old. My mother took me to Paris and then other places throughout Western Europe.
When I was a child I had a nightmare, and in the morning, I asked my mother and father, 'If I kill someone, would you still love me?' My parents were very preoccupied with this, but I think I'm not the only one to ask for that - not love, but absolute fidelity.
I've been a war reporter and a human rights defender. A professor and a columnist. A diplomat and - by far most thrillingly - a mother. And what I've learned from all these experiences is that any change worth making is going to be hard. Period.
I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long.
Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.
My father is a teacher; my mother was a telecom employee. I come from Palermo; I was raised in Ethiopia. I am homosexual. I didn't go to film school.
Philadelphia's Schuylkill River has long been the mother of waters for mid-Atlantic rowers, just as the Charles, which separates Boston from Cambridge, is for New England boaters.
Moms and dads don't last forever. If you've got unfinished business, we need to face that, and that's not easy. Every child wants to love their mother and their father. Love is the most important thing, and when they feel rejected and unloved, that hole can never be filled by anyone else.
My mother never asked me whether I wanted to go to college, but told me I was going - to the University of Maryland on an academic scholarship.
When I started getting so many haters and closed doors, I decided to prove that it could be done. I was a divorced single mother of three at the time and a size 12 - not your typical model artist that labels feel work for the music industry.
To support my brothers and me, my mother got a job so menial that we never discussed it.
I was raised in Nigeria, and my mother is white, but I never saw her as white, not until I came to America. She was just my mother. She didn't really have a color.
I'm a fun-loving guy. We are basically from Amritsar and ours is a chilled-out family. I think I have got my humour from my mother.
Whenever I write about motherhood - and I write about it a lot - I am drawing on my experiences as a mother and also my experiences as a daughter.
What kept me out of trouble is going right to the edge and then... thinking that my mother would be embarrassed, and that I didn't want to embarrass her, and that my father would be embarrassed, and I just didn't want to do that to my family.
I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical data, is taken from my own family. Except I don't have a serial killer as a mother!
