My mother was killed in a plane crash, so I hate travelling in planes. Death is so unexpected. I would actually rather stay at home and not go anywhere.
My mother is an office manager, my father a professor of economics and financial planner.
My mother taught me a lot about respect for all living things - for plants and animals. I am a vegetarian. I was brought up that way.
My mother was a nurse, and in her era, most diseases weren't understood; people put mustard plasters on knees and rubbed camphor on your chest if you had a cough and did funny things to you if you had tuberculosis - all these things that really made very little difference once proper treatments were brought in.
I grew up as an only child and my mother was also an only child, so we were both very passionate about reading. I think I passed that on to my daughter, who went plowing through 'Harry Potter' and every other book possible!
My parents were Zionists born in Poland. My father was a rabbi who didn't know much about science and ran a grocery store in the neighborhood with my mother's help.
Being an immigrant mother can be hard, but being a poor immigrant mother is much harder. You don't generally get to sit in cafes polishing your French by reading 'Le Monde.'
My mother always told me it wasn't polite to ask what people make.
I have led an unusual life. I have buried a father killed at age 50 and two brothers killed in the prime of their lives. I raised my children as a single mother when my husband was arrested and held for eight years without a conviction - a hostage to my political career.
I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
I've always been inspired by small details that make me wander. My mother would ask me, 'What are you looking at so intensely?' I would answer, 'Everything and nothing.' She really supported my wanderings, called me Marco Polo.
My own mother is very accomplished and makes things like bahar breads as though they are going out of fashion - they are like stuffed parathas and can contain anything from potatoes to poppy seeds.
That's how I make work. Along the way, I take notes, I read about history and popular culture. Sometimes I act out things in the studio. I go back to my mother's hair salon so I can hear three voices going all at once. I pull inspiration from everything.
I feel a vocabulary in my music that is coming from popular music. Popular music is like the mother of all languages.
I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.
All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.
My father is Portuguese, and in Portugal, it is traditional to take your mother's maiden name as a middle name. My mum is called Tough.
Healthy children are born from healthy, respected, well-nourished and educated mothers and it is imperative that they have a voice in the decisions which affect them. If you empower a mother and let her have her say towards a poverty-free future, the positive impact this would have on ending hunger will be immense.
I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deciding that I had failed ignominiously.
I remember, after my first postpartum depression, I didn't know what had happened to me. I was stuck in this gray depression where I just wanted to retreat and pull the covers over my head and weep. My mother and I, we went to a psychiatrist, and he just patted me on the head and told me I had baby blues, which was not helpful, obviously.
