My mother bought me a brand new suit for going away to college. We were poor, but she wanted me to have that. It was a powder blue suit with peg pants - you know, skinny at the bottom. I think I made quite an impression with that.
I told Mother of my decision to study medicine. She encouraged me to speak to Father... I began in a roundabout way... He listened, looking at me with that serious and penetrating gaze of his that caused me such trepidation, and asked whether I knew what I wanted to do.
I remember my mother and I sitting down counting off our pennies to pay our bills. We really had nothing.
My mother's a very spiritual woman, and I think Pentecostal religion, Bible religion, was very important to her because it gave her a context for a very spiritual approach to life.
I would ask my mother to show me how to walk - and she did show me. That's why I think it's funny when people say, 'Did so-and-so teach you how to walk?' And I always say, 'You must be talking about my mother, because it was my mother who taught me how to walk.'
The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become a fearless mother is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly - indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection.
Perfectionism is really a challenge for me, and it causes me to be super-critical of myself in so many ways: about body image constantly; about parenting; about being a mother.
My son is a musician who next year will be attending the LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts in New York City, which his mother helped him get into by making him practice all the time.
Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, on the periphery of the Russian Empire. His father was a hard-drinking cobbler whose relationship with Joseph's mother, Keke Geladze, came to an end when the boy was around six years old.
My mother did not raise me to ask for permission to lead.
I remember seeing Amy Sedaris in a stint where she played somebody's alcoholic mother in one scene and in the next she was Ross Perot. I remember thinking she was so awesome.
On a personal level, there are many people who have meant a great deal to me. My father and mother were certainly of vital importance, not only in themselves but because they created a world for me to revolt against.
I had long been resistant to doing a documentary about my mother for personal reasons. And I thought there was no way she'd want to, but then I asked her and she said 'yes.'
At 15, I knew someone whose mother cooked macrobiotic, so I persuaded my mother to go macrobiotic with me.
I still went to church regularly every Sunday; that is we all went there together. I reverenced the family pew where we had assembled for so many years; and apart from that reason I hold it dear because it is associated in my memory with my mother.
I wanted to be an actor ever since I got on stage for the first time, aged 13. Before that, I thought I might follow in the medical footsteps of my parents: my father was a doctor, my mother a pharmacist.
It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.
My mother had a lot of phobias. She's pregnant with me and she was a very phobic person. So I was born into phobia, basically.
My mother says I was vaccinated with a phonograph needle. I love to talk. I just love to talk.
You know, my family is very musical, I was surrounded by it. And from four years old I was the one that asked my mother could I take piano lessons.
