I don't think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.
My mother had very humble beginnings - to put it mildly. Her dad built their home out of timber that he cut down on their land. No heat, no air-conditioning - 'no foolishness,' as he would call it.
I say to my mother all the time, 'You're the child.' And she says, 'Yeah, you're the mother.' I've been that way with her since I was 11.
The difference between our family and other poor families was that my mother actively chose to be poor. She was highly literate, and she had a college degree, but after my father left, she took the first secretarial job she could find and never looked for other employment again.
My mother's Puerto Rican and my father's Russian-Jewish, so we consider ourselves to be Jewricans or Puertojews. I think Puertojew sounds like a kosher bathroom, so I prefer Jewrican.
I have an incredible role model in my mom. She was a single mother raising two kids in New York.
I am often asked the question: 'What is your favorite type of food?' Although I always answer Japanese, the real response should be and is pierogi, the delectable Polish dumplings that my mother, Big Martha, made so well in many incarnations: potato, sweet cabbage, blueberry, peach, plum, and apricot.
I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.
I was born at home in rural Kentucky, in 1942, in a house that my father Howard had built. He did most of the construction himself and built it on land that his father had given him when he married my mother Faye.
No mother, or father, should despair over whether or not they can afford - or access - the health care their child needs.
My mother was a good mistress to her servants, taking care of them in their sicknesses, not sparing any cost she was able to bestow for their recovery.
I made a very slatternly mother, notably unkeen on housework, unaware that homes need to be cleaned now and then, and too often to be found with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other.
There would be more sense in insisting on man's limitations because he cannot be a mother than on a woman's because she can be.
My mother sent me to speech classes, but the other kids still teased me. I was shy. I stooped. Instead of talking, I kept journals. That's where my love of words comes from. I majored in journalism.
In 'Twice Born' I play my character in her 20s, 30s and 50s. For the fifty year old scenes, I had some prosthetics; it was interesting to see how I'm going to look when I'm fifty-five or so. I actually saw similarities between my grandmothers and my mother.
I did a lot of work with myself over the course of being pregnant and the first few months of being pregnant. It's nice, the pace of being pregnant; it gives you a long time to not just germinate a baby but germinate the mother that you're gonna be.
There is one simple Divinity found in all things, one fecund Nature, preserving mother of the universe insofar as she diversely communicates herself, casts her light into diverse subjects, and assumes various names.
We are all anxious to be accepted. But if you have a strong mother and father who tell you that you don't have to dress a crazy way, or hang out with people who are looking for trouble in order to be loved and accepted, then half the battle is over.
My mother, my grandmother, my uncles would play Ethiopian artists like Aster Aweke and Mulatu Astatke all the time in the house.
But I think what made me go into theater was seeing my mother onstage. The first thing she did was Mrs. Frank in 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' The second thing she did was a play about Freud called 'The Far Country.' She played a paralyzed woman in Vienna who goes to see Freud.
It makes me really proud to be an Argentinean, to have the pope be Argentinian. Pope Francis has been incredible. My mother used to know him when he was in Argentina.
My mother is my manager and so knows exactly what I do and so on.
I had such high expectations of myself. I was going to be the best mother, the best housewife, the best entertainer, the best nurse, you know - what it was, I was going to be the best. And I could never live up to my expectations.
My parents were very volatile but very loving. My father would get jealous if my mother looked at somebody. I used to be insanely jealous. It comes out of insecurity. It can come and go, but you get to the point in life where you don't have this raging jealousy and protectiveness about your world.
People used to call her Debbie Reynolds' daughter. Now they call me Princess Leia's mother!
I have the strength from my mother, the survivability. I have wonderful qualities from my mother - but please, Mother, forgive me - I heard judgment constantly about my father.
A man can't pass on, like a mother could, an awareness of your body, or sensuality, or what it means to be a woman. I was never taught what femininity was. I learnt it - or rather I invented it - on my own. I tended not to talk at all, if people were staring at me.
I've never really understood attachment to a place for reasons of birth. That my mother happened to give birth to me in a certain place doesn't, to my mind, justify any thankfulness towards that place. It could have been anywhere.
Billy Barnes signed me and got me my first role in an interracial love story filmed in Atlanta called 'Together For Days' with Clifton Davis. My mother thinks it was my best work. You cannot find a copy of it.
When I decide to become a mother I will just be that. That will be really important to me.
When I was 17 years old, I put out an album while my mother was dying of cancer. That right there alone is a struggle. That's hard. That's tough for anybody.
Both my grandfathers and my mother's brother were musicians.
We happen to believe that emissions going into the atmosphere are not good for us as humans or Mother Earth.
So although women can do anything that men can't do, they can also do something that men can't do, and that is mother their children.
I came from a divorced mother and father, obviously mixed race.
People see I am a mother and head of a household. Today in Chile, one-third of households are run by women. They wake up, take the children to school, go to work. To them I am hope.
