It would be ridiculous for me to say I am unlucky, but, like any other family and any other girl, I've had my ups and downs.
All of my books are based in some way on my personal experiences, or the experiences of members of my family, or the stories kids would tell me in school.
I loved teaching. It was my world. I only left because I was overwhelmed with three careers - teaching, writing, and my family.
It's hard enough to work and raise a family when your kids are all healthy and relatively normal, but when you add on some kind of disability or disease, it can just be such a burden.
I have now disposed of all my property to my family. There is one thing more I wish I could give them, and that is the Christian religion.
My kids paid the price for my career. We can say it's for our family, but it almost never is. It's about us. It's just some of us can pretend better than others.
The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.
When I was younger I was really shy, but I'd always be singing, driving my family crazy. Apparently I was even singing when I was in the cot. That probably didn't sound too good!
Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live.
People just don't laugh when their family is violated, and you don't shrug it off. You band together and you defend together. It's a funny, primitive instinct.
I was the youngest in my family. When the other kids went to school, my mother would make them breakfast and then she would go back to bed for an hour, so I was sort of babysat by television.
It's the sense of what family is at the dinner table. It was the joy of knowing mother was in the kitchen making our favorite dish. I wish more people would do this and recall the joy of life.
What little family I got is in Mississippi. A whole lot of them died before I left, and my sister died a long time ago, before my mama did.
I don't understand that, because I think that what people like most about the show is that they recognize themselves in the characters and their problems, so the more believable the family is, the more we can draw the audience in.
I have born-again Christians in my family, and they are completely against abortion... Everybody's got to stop being afraid of it real soon. Who's going to do it if a woman's network doesn't? People are going to be dying.
But the way that we've got it organized in our family, we try not to work at the same time, so I'm just now starting to look around. I think I'd like to do a film.
While it has been hurtful to my family and me to read constantly in the media that I was under investigation, I am pleased that as expected my spending has been found to be in order.
There's a lot of things that go on when you're on tour that cannot be controlled. I'm not even talking about myself, but of course there's sexual activity and drugs, fighting and language; it is certainly not a place to raise a family.
I came from an intellectual family. Most were doctors, preachers, teachers, businessmen. My grandfather was a small businessman. His father was an abolitionist doctor, and his father was an immigrant from Germany.
We'll sort of get over the marriage first and then maybe look at the kids. But obviously we want a family so we'll have to start thinking about that.
I work in areas related to child protection and family safety, women's empowerment, the creation of opportunities for youth, and culture and tourism. Daunting? Yes. Impossible? No. In fact, such challenges energize me.
