My mother, with a Master's in English Literature, taught me to appreciate language and that words matter.
My father is a visual artist, so I was influenced by him, and my mother is an English teacher who forced me to read a lot of books and poetry and get involved in theatre. I developed a varied taste for different arts.
You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.
Mitch Glazer and I went to high school together, and his mother was my English teacher for two years. She was my favorite teacher, and I followed Mitch's career as a journalist, so we've kind of kept in touch over the years.
My mother had been an English teacher in India before she came to the U.K., and she taught me to read early on - not only in English, but in Hindi, too. My teachers didn't like the fact that I was reading more quickly than they were teaching, and as a consequence, I would sometimes get bored in class.
My parents are huge influences on me. My mother was an English teacher. My father played professional rugby and coached rugby for the Irish rugby team.
For my mother, everything stands in relation to her Welshness; the fact she married an Englishman seems to be something of an issue. She's kind of anti-English... anti-imperialist.
My father and mother emigrated to Canada in 1958, but there's nobody more English than an Englishman who no longer lives in England, and our home was a shrine to all things English.
This is a moment that I deeply wish my parents could have lived to share. My father would have enjoyed what you have so generously said of me-and my mother would have believed it.
I was born five days before D-Day in 1944. My father was a mechanical engineer, which was a reserved occupation, so he didn't have to enlist. My mother was a housewife. She worked in a bank before marrying my father.
My dad was enlisted in the Navy; my mother was a nurse. It just was never a thought process. It was just go to the best school you can go to, do the best you possibly can do, and be the best person you can possibly be, and I think our faith had a lot to do with that.
I enlisted when I was a boy. The Navy looked after me like my mother. It fed me, took care of me and gave me wonderful opportunities.
I sit there pouring out my woes year after year, coming up with one enormity after another about my mother and the way she let me down; but it doesn't make me any the less fearful.
It's a feminine universe, and every person who has ever tried to convince you otherwise is doing little more than pounding on his mother's breast, enraged by the predicament he faces as a leaf, dangling from the tree of life.
I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.
I could make a martyrly claim to having been the victim of childhood enslavement when I report that I started regularly cooking with my mother at a hot stove when I was five. But the truth is I wanted to cook. Cooking meant being near food.
I am positive - determined to move forward with my life, bring up my babies, and do the best job I can as a mother, entertainer, and person.
I can't think I've ever loved anybody quite as much... My mother was my life, really; she was my entire world.
My mother was in labour for two full days before having me on a sunny August afternoon. She went into labour on the 7th, and I chose to make my big entrance on the 9th.
I have always had an entrepreneurial spirit. When I was seven, I remember sticking a sign on my bedroom window that read, 'Manicures and massage, come on in.' My mother rushed in, saying, 'All these weirdos are knocking on the door.'
