I have a large collection of town cars because when I was just a snipe in the gutter, growing up in Los Angeles, a town car drove by. I remember running in the house to get my mother so she could see it. It was utterly magnificent.
A mother is neither cocky, nor proud, because she knows the school principal may call at any minute to report that her child had just driven a motorcycle through the gymnasium.
My mother comes from the Dominican Republic, so I have the Latin side in me, and I grew up with Gypsies. But I like any kind of music as long as it's good music.
As the mother teaches her children how to express themselves in their language, so one Gypsy musician teaches the other. They have never shown any need for notation.
A few years ago, I found out that there's a lot of Gypsy blood on my mother's side. I'm wild in that way - I've been brought up to do my own thing.
I remember my mother had this deck of cards that her mother had given her and that she passed on to me. It was a gypsy tarot deck that I used to carry everywhere.
It's a huge change from when I started in the 1960s, but what is really impressive is that the number of ladies on set, the women working on set is a huge percentage. There used to be no women. It was just the leading lady's mother, perhaps the hairdresser and the makeup person.
My mother had a premonition and she felt that hairdressing would be very very good for me.
I got a telegraph from my mother who said that my step-father had had a heart attack, come home and earn a living. So I went back to England and the only thing I knew to earn any cash was through hairdressing.
I used to draw a lot. If my mother would ask me to do something else, I'd have a hairy conniption. I'd just go crazy.
My mother had had six children in five and a half years, and three of them died in that time.
It's extraordinary what children put up with. I happened to see two of my uncles put my father up against the wall of my grandmother's house and knock his teeth out, because he'd been unpleasant to my mother. The next day I went upstairs and found my father making a rather half-hearted attempt to gas himself.
'Hamlet' was the first movie I saw. In 1948, my mother said, 'I'm going to take you to see 'Hamlet' with Laurence Olivier.' She was worried about taking me to it because she wasn't sure I was old enough to understand it or to maybe be adversely affected by it, but I got recordings of it and memorized all the soliloquies.
When I was 14, I remember wanting a Coach bag, and my mother couldn't afford it. I decided at that age that I was going to grow up and get a job so that I could buy as many handbags as I wanted. And no one was ever going to stop me.
My mother had heard the story of Hannah and Samuel, so she prayed that if God would give her a son, she would give that son to God. That was a perfectly appropriate thing for her to do, but as I observe, she did not have to tell me she had made such a promise. In particular, she did not have to tell me when I was six.
I think my mother characters have changed a lot since Sasha was born, just because I understand what a hard job it is now, and I'm coming at it from another angle - like you just love and care about this person so much, and just want to protect them from everything.
Most of the kids that I meet in the street are serious hardened criminals that I meet in the street, never had a mother and a father to love them, to protect them, to teach them right from wrong and lead them out of crime and gangs and stuff like that.
I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
And my daddy could play a harmonica and also the guitar, so I guess I got a little bit from both of 'em, but I think mostly from my mother's side of the family.
Within a few hours I had them off, was about ready to play the shows. That night I opened, and during the week Harris was over to the house to talk my mother into letting me leave home.
