My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
I became the kind of parent my mother was to me.
As far back as I can remember, my mother would have me down by the bed at night with her, praying. I can still hear her voice calling my name to God and telling him that she wanted me to follow him in whatever he called me to do.
When I was about 8 or 9, I lived in New Jersey with my mother and we were seven deep in one bedroom and sometimes we didn't have electricity.
I grew up on the south side of Chicago, most of that time on welfare. My mother and sister and I used to live with my grandparents and various cousins. We shared a two-bedroom tenement, and the three of us slept in one of those bedrooms and had a set of bunk beds.
I blame my mother for my poor sex life. All she told me was 'the man goes on top and the woman underneath.' For three years my husband and I slept in bunk beds.
There was one very special scene at the end of the film. My character, Zhao Di, has been sick. She wakes up and her mother tells her that the man she loves has come back from the city and had spent the day by her bedside.
Men have the influence and power in business and politics. It is the mother who can make the child's bedtime earlier, take away desserts or ground the child.
The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting her to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is a superb creature and looks every inch a queen.
My mother, we were a very poor family. When I was a kid, we would be in our little room, and there would be a knock on the door almost every night with a hobo begging for food. Even though we didn't even have enough to eat, my mother always found something to give them.
In my house, you got in trouble if you didn't speak up. My mom would be furious at us if we went to school and behaved nicely if someone treated us badly. If we got in trouble because we had yelled at them or told them that they were wrong, my mother would be like, 'Good job.'
I am not allowed to be afraid. My mother made me like that. As a child, if I was afraid of the dark, she would lock me in the closet. Things like this. And she would talk about the time she spent in the concentration camp, but not about being afraid, only about the good side of it.
I thought that I was going to be like this earth mother. When people would complain about being pregnant, I was like, 'What are you talking about? It's incredible! Just enjoy it.'
I come from a background where there would be one mirror above the basin that was used by everyone in the house. If you spent more than five minutes in front of the mirror, you would probably get a whack. My mother was so strict that if anyone complimented me for being pretty, she would not encourage that discussion.
Women over 30 are usually somebody's mother in a 'Porky's' movie, being silly and being ridiculed. There's just not a whole lot for them to do. It's just coffee-pouring on a bigger scale.
Parenting is something that I got early, because when you grow up without a father being there, and you see a single mother struggle to feed the kids, you do not want to put your own blood through that.
Growing up in Beirut, I used to go to the souks with my mother to buy fabrics... I understood fashion at an early age, and my first designs were when I was five.
He came to the States in 1963, I think with a view to making up with my mother, but that didn't work. He came for three weeks, and drank his way all over Brooklyn. And went back... I went to his funeral in Belfast.
My father was from Belfast; my mother was from Crossmolina. I grew up in Dublin.
While I believed deeply in my husband's vision for this country... and I was certain he would make an extraordinary President... like any mother, I was worried about what it would mean for our girls if he got that chance. How would we keep them grounded under the glare of the national spotlight?
