A husband's mother and his wife had generally better be visitors than inmates.
I like to sing because my mother was a singer. She sang to me all the time, so I learned to love singing. I did have a career as little 10-year-old George Benson. I made my first record as a vocalist, but I've been playing guitar since I was 9.
A lot of my father's family in Canada volunteered in the First World War because they saw it as a war that was defending the mother country.
My mother never said to lose weight. Diets were never a big deal. My mom was always beautiful and voluptuous and curvy, and I always thought she was gorgeous.
My father and my mother and my sister and I have always voted Republican, always.
My mother often told us that it is a poor dog that will not wag its own tail.
The economic dimension is very clear. I was at a dinner party, a mother got up, who's a very distinguished scientist, and said she had to get home and help her daughter with her homework. The two waiters, their faces changed. They were working their second jobs, they couldn't get home to help their kids with homework.
Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. Leopards, cobras, monkeys, rivers and trees; they all served as my teachers when I lived as a wanderer in the Himalayan foothills.
When I decided to be a singer, my mother warned me I'd be alone a lot. Basically we all are.
My mother was very wary at first. And now she's come around 180 degrees. She's, like, one of my biggest fans now. Like, she'll come over to my house, and she'll be like, 'OK, listen. I need two T-shirts from the comedy show, and give me three DVDs. The neighbors are asking for them.'
I didn't grow up in public life. I lived with my mother in Boston, not in Washington, DC, so I was somewhat sheltered from that.
I think I definitely learned how to structure songs, just from listening to a lot of 1960s, 1970s pop music, although I'm sure my mother's watchful eye had a lot to do with it.
My mother said that we're so lucky to be women. It's not that men are weak. Men are men. We're two completely different animals.
I adore clothes - they're my weakest link! My mother was the same, and she taught me always to look polished.
I sang a song at my sister's wedding. My mother forced me into that, too. But that one felt all right.
I was raised on T.V. dinners because in those days, they were considered a well-balanced meal. And when I was sick, my mother fed me beef-barley soup and peanut butter sandwiches. That's about it for childhood food memories.
My father left school at 14, my mother at 13. My father was clever and well-read. He took a newspaper, always watched the news, discussed it all the time.
My mother cried when I told her I really didn't want to go to West Point. So I went.
I came to Harlem from West Virginia when I was three, after my mother died. My father, who was very poor, gave me up to two wonderful people, my foster parents.
I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.
