Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But education there was casual at best. Our mother and father were high school teachers and challenged the pervasive easy-going ignorance.
I have many memories of waking up to eat breakfast that my mother carefully prepared for us and her saying, what do y'all want for lunch, and as we're eating lunch, what do y'all want for dinner? It's always about the next meal.
My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized.
In my early days in Hollywood I tried to be economical. I designed my own clothes, much to my mother's distress.
Me and my mother, we both love Eddie Murphy.
I was born on October 21, 1956 in Burbank, California. My father, Eddie Fisher, was a famous singer. My mother, Debbie Reynolds, was a movie star. Her best-known role was in 'Singin' In The Rain.'
My mother was a very, very funny, outrageous, outspoken person, and she never edited me. Her whole thing in my life was if anybody had a problem with me, tell them to go to hell.
An Editor becomes kind of your mother. You expect love and encouragement from an Editor.
If I weren't performing, I'd be a beauty editor or a therapist. I love creativity, but I also love to help others. My mother was a hairstylist, and they listen to everyone's problems - like a beauty therapist!
I'm grateful to intelligent people. That doesn't mean educated. That doesn't mean intellectual. I mean really intelligent. What black old people used to call 'mother wit' means intelligence that you had in your mother's womb. That's what you rely on. You know what's right to do.
For those whose wit becomes the mother of villainy, those it educates to be evil in all things.
But then my mother, who's a very selfless, stoic person from a family of Marines, would tell us that what was good for our father was good for us - he would make more money; therefore, we'd be able to get better educations.
Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.
I had a very normal, very typical American childhood. My father worked for the government at the Pentagon and my mother was an educator, so we had a very average upbringing, but that's helped me in my writing because I'm writing about ordinary things.
I am very much an only child, meaning I am self-reliant, egocentric, sociable. I had my mother, father, and an uncle who lived with us, all doting on me.
My mother was a dramatic and egocentric person, and she died before my father, who died of Alzheimer's disease. But I'd often thought, God, we were so lucky that was the order in which they died because she would have felt put upon.
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.
I love soccer. My father is from Argentina and my mother is from El Salvador. I grew up watching Argentinean soccer. I get really worked up watching soccer. It's in my blood.
You want a lesson? I'll give you a lesson. How about a geography lesson? My father's from Puerto Rico. My mother's from El Salvador. And neither one of those is Mexico.
Nature is our eldest mother; she will do no harm.
