Conversations with my mother, father, my grandparents, as I've grown up have obviously driven me towards wanting to try and make a difference as much as possible.
I was born late - what my mother calls the last kick of a dying horse. There's three of us children, but I'm 13 or 14 years younger than my brother and sister.
My mother used to dress me in quite good-taste clothes, and I really wanted things that were sparkly and spangly and trashy and nasty. I don't know if I ever chose fashion; it was just there in me.
When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
My father's mother was from Liverpool and she had this very beautiful English china. I only wanted to drink my cocoa out of my grandmother's cup and saucer.
Quality speaks by itself. Rightly communicated it creates Joy. Like an Infant needs no words to express to her mother. Any success of communication enhances beauty of both, which too needs no words to endorse.
When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.
To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.
If Romeo and Juliet make a tragedy of it nowadays, they have only to blame their own mismanagement, for the world is with them as it has never been before, and all sensible fathers and mothers know it.
I had long been resistant to doing a documentary about my mother for personal reasons. And I thought there was no way she'd want to, but then I asked her and she said 'yes.'
Again, I was influenced by my father, who was very much an atheist and took pride in combating the traditional or orthodox forms of Judaism, which his parents and which my mother's parents were very steeped in.
I used to dig around the sandbox and pull out pieces of coal and show them to my mother, and she used to say that's how I must have known I was going to be a geologist.
Somehow I am really relaxed within the chaos of having a baby - and anyone who's a mother knows it's very hard to relax, because there is so much to do and worry about!
I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian.
One thing that became clear to me is that images of a divine mother are surprisingly important in the psychological wholeness of women, especially in the process of women taking up residence in their own authority.
When I'm a little bit upset, my eyebrow goes up, and that is a trait that my beautiful mother passed down to me. We always knew in the house: 'Mommy's upset; her eyebrow just went up.'
But I got drafted out of high school, and my mother wasn't having it. She was like, you're not about to think that you can just play ball, because if you get hurt, you're going to be out of luck.
I still like getting dressed up and having the opportunity to borrow beautiful dresses, but as a mother - and as somebody who's schedule isn't always my own - I don't shop a lot, or think about clothes a lot.
My mother came from St. Thomas. I heard that melody and all I did was actually adapt it. I made my adaptation of sort of an island traditional melody. It did become sort of my trademark tune.
I was a normal person, living in a rough area with a foreign mother, I endured it and came out of the other side to help hundreds of thousands of people worldwide to change their lives just like I had mine.
We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.
