At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.
I was very independent growing up, but there were things that were bothering me that I never told anybody. I would talk to our animals at home.
I'm pretty shy when I go home because I was pretty shy growing up, and I think I go back to that person.
If you want to become a fossil, you need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried. You then hope that the Earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface.
My father was an electrical engineer who worked at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. When I was growing up, my mother wrote humor columns for the local paper. She was the Erma Bombeck of Murrysville, Pa.
The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
I had to learn how to chop wood actually - I don't think my dad would have let me go chop wood in the backyard growing up.
Nowadays, if you have a mustache, people look at you like you're crazy. But when I was growing up, I never saw my dad without a mustache.
I missed my dad a lot growing up, even though we were together as a family. My dad was really a workaholic. And he was always working.
I was brought up by very witty people who were dealing with quite difficult things: disease and death... I was brought up by people who tended to giggle at funerals.
People on death row, the treatment of animals, women's right to choose. So much in America is based on religious fundamentalist Christianity. Grow up! This is the modern world!
I think that when something happens when you're growing up, like a death or divorce, it does open the world slightly because things aren't as straightforward.
I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.
Making changes in the fast food that makes up such a significant part of the American diet, even if the numbers aren't impressive, will have important health up sides.
If you've got a big gut and you start doing sit-ups, you are going to get bigger because you build up the muscle. You've got to get rid of that fat! How do you get rid of fat? By changing your diet.
When I grew up, I only had two dreams. One was to be a cowboy and another was to be in the military. I grew up extremely patriotic and riding horses.
Catcher in the Rye had a profound impact on me-the idea that we all have lots of dreams that are slowly being chipped away as we grow up.
I think that they way my parents raised me, they taught me to always follow my dreams and never give up, no matter what the obstacle.
It was a lovely opportunity for the first time in my whole career to stand up and thank people who are really responsible for me getting to realize my dreams.
I've always wanted to design a home collection line because growing up, I was obsessed with reorganizing my room.
But I think it's up to a local congregation to determine whether or not a marriage should be blessed of God. And it shouldn't be up to the government.
