My mother's career was over at 40 but she was still trying to be everyone's buddy, always smiling for the cameras.
I had a scholarship to Stanford because I won three California Speech tournaments. Before I started Stanford, I told my mother I wanted to take a bus into Hollywood and see if I could get an agent.
All of us wish we'd had perfect childhoods, with a mother and father who modeled ideal parental attitudes and taught us to internalize the tenets of self-love. Many of us, however, did not.
One thing my mother did is that she never looked in the mirror and said, 'I'm so fat,'or 'I'm so ugly. I need to go on a diet.' Projecting that onto yourself is only going to make your daughter or son think that of themselves. Because they're a product of you.
My dad is Dominican, my mother's Puerto Rican, and I got into bachata at the age of 10 or 11. When I started listening, it had a reputation for being music for hick people. I thought that had to be changed. I was born and raised in the Bronx, and I knew you make something cool if you're cool.
People in India like to touch a lot. It's not very nice for any girl to be touched by strangers wherever they want. You wouldn't do that to your sister or mother, but just because one is an actor, they think she is your property.
Who I really am is the mother of six kids and Woody's wife.
What it takes is to actually write: not to think about it, not to imagine it, not to talk about it, but to actually want to sit down and write. I'm lucky I learned that habit a really long time ago. I credit my mother with that. She was an English teacher, but she was a writer.
I was blessed to have a mother and father that recognized the value of education.
I am a Cuban mother, and you do not let your cubs get into trouble without you trying to help them all the way.
Whether your mother is a novelist like mine or a third-generation military wife, the idea of a son or daughter being in mortal danger is terrifying.
My mother and father split up when I was three and my brother was still in the womb.
I believe the question now is: who murdered my mother?
In Jenny Offill's remarkable first novel, 'Last Things,' 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her.
I was preppy, then suddenly switched around age 14. I asked my mother to go to this vintage store, and she let me buy a leopard swing coat, pink cigarette pants, and lime-green gloves.
When I need guidance or just to kvetch or to bounce ideas off of people, I go to Gail Simone, who is very much kind of the den mother of all of us who are working comics.
My natural mother died one month after I was born, apparently due to giving birth at an advanced age.
I am just sorry my own mother had to live under that regime for most of her life. I was lucky. I got out and, 14 years later, Czechoslovakia became a free country. So I feel anger, even fury, at this bloody system that ruined so many people's lives for no reason whatsoever.
My grandparents - both of my mother's parents - were actors, and they ran the Reading Repertory Theatre Company, through the town of Reading, where I come from.
My mother was in Scientology my whole life. Most people don't know that we were raised in it - I didn't decide to get into it. I was brought into it by my mom.
My parents had four children quickly, divorced quickly - when I was two - and my mother remarried quickly. We were suddenly in a different environment with a different father.
My mother could make something out of nothing - and everything started from scratch.
Somebody ripped their pants open at my wedding, dipping my mother. My mother is not a lady who throws herself into a dip that often, so I don't think he thought she was really going to do it.
My father was raised in an orphanage, and my mother was an immigrant from Poland whose first childhood memory was of hunger. Somehow, despite all of that, I am called a member of the 'elite.' If so, I damned well earned it.
The directness of my mother is clearly in my voice. Her opinion is always a very strong opinion at the dining room table. I think she empowered me to have the same drive.
Unfortunately, in my home, we didn't speak Arabic; it was a mixed culture. My mother played a dominant role in our educational upbringing, and we grew up as part and parcel of Belize's culture.
'The Exorcist' is absolutely my favorite horror film, and I watched it when I was, like, seven years old with my mother for the first time. I don't know why my mom let me watch that. I couldn't go to the bathroom by myself. I couldn't go upstairs by myself. I couldn't sleep.
My mother used to tell this corny story about how the doctor smacked me on the behind when I was born and I thought it was applause, and I have been looking for it ever since.
I didn't wake up one day and think, 'I'm not going to have children.' My mother was a housewife and brought up three children, so I just thought it would happen.
My mother always gives the best advice. When I left Puerto Rico to pursue my dreams, she always supported me and said to me, 'I'm never going to cut your wings, so don't let anyone else do that to you.' That has been my philosophy through life. I want to share that valuable lesson with my little girl someday.
One thing my mother had a nose for was inauthenticity.
My mother was the first singer I had contact with. She sang constantly to us around the house, in church.
I grew up Catholic. My mother is from El Salvador, so my family on her side is Roman Catholic. My father is Protestant, and while he was spiritual, he wasn't much of a churchgoing person. I think it's fairly common for families to be brought up in the mother's religion.
My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn't have any money, because Africa was the 'dark continent', and because I was a girl.
My mother was a mother. She didn't really work, apart from bringing us up, which a job in itself, but at an age where lots of people are thinking of retiring, so is having up to 20 or 30 engagements a day, and she's brilliant at it - she has always been brilliant with people.
My mother never saw any of my films until she was in her late 80s, and that was 'Music of the Heart' with Meryl Streep.
