I was always the one leading the way in terms of wanting to do acting, singing and dancing. I was lucky that my mother had a very well-adjusted perspective of the world and never pressured me to do anything I didn't want to do.
Sometimes I get ideas from childhood. In 'The Hat', Hedgie starts getting teased about his hat, and he just pretends that everything is okay. That's the advice that my mother gave me - not to get mad and pretend that everything is okay. And it worked.
My mother was the prettiest woman in the town. He was a bit older than her. They made me. And he split.
A lot of people have no access to beauty. When I was growing up, my mother had only a few pretty things to look at.
As a late teenager, I had some puppy fat on me, and I noticed that I could put on weight. I have always been very disciplined because my mother was very beautiful, a very pretty woman, but she was immobilised by obesity. At her biggest, she was about 17 stone. And she was always on some sort of fad diet.
My earliest memory is of my first day at primary school and the distress of seeing my mother part from me.And being in a room full of strangers - of aliens. I felt that I would never see her again.
In my experience (I am the lone father of an eight-year-old boy who lost his mother when he was one year old), parenting is the most difficult of all jobs: forget your chief executives, editors, prime ministers and the like - parenting is far more challenging.
Prince Charles was once obsessed with a particular beauty, Anna Wallace, and couldn't understand why she walked out on him after he spent the evening dancing with Camilla at the Queen Mother's 80th birthday party.
My biggest struggle being a woman in the workforce has not only been with my mother, my grandmother, and a lot of my girlfriends. When I'm working late hours, I'm almost punished for it by them. It's almost absurd that I would prioritize work over catching up with my girlfriends. If I were a man, that would just come second nature.
I'm a very private person who grew up with a strict German mother who believed 'loose lips sink ships.'
My own mother, my sister and nearly all the women in my family had full-time jobs as mothers. They were wonderful at it. They drove their children back and forth to soccer, skating lessons, piano lessons, private schools, but I sensed, even in my own mother, a kind of distant dissatisfaction.
My first book of poems was published privately in 1949. That was my mother. The book was '25 Poems.' It cost 200 dollars.
My mother was right when she said that turning pro would take away my youth.
When I was a kid, I played 'Super Mario Bros' and 'Megaman 2' and '3' for hours and hours, trying to convince my mother they were good for me because they helped my hand-eye coordination. They influenced a whole generation of people to make computers what they are now, through problem-solving and so on.
If we had a hard time, my mother would sit me down and we would talk about it, and she kept talking and kept processing until we started to laugh about it.
The fact that a woman is attached to her professional life should not prevent her from being a mother.
I was myself brought up with my brother, whose name was Matthias, for he was my own brother, by both father and mother; and I made mighty proficiency in the improvements of my learning, and appeared to have both a great memory and understanding.
My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself.
I feel like I think like a woman because I grew up with my mother and my sister, so I've just been programmed to think like a girl.
I hated being typecast in those roles. It was personally limiting, only playing stereotyped heavies. But I got those roles because I was angry, because that's what I projected. I was angry at my mother and father because they didn't get along, angry at the church. On top of that, I had an extreme lack of self-confidence.
