My father really was not the dominant person who raised the family it was my mother who raised the family.

My mother isolated herself from all family and friends for some 20 years. And never met her grandchild my son.

While I have felt lonely many times in my life the oddest feeling of all was after my mother Lucille died. My father had already died but I always had some attachment to our big family while she was alive. It seems strange to say now that I felt so lonely yet I did.

For me it's about the way I carry myself and the way I treat other people. My relationship and how I feel about God and what He does for me is something deeply personal. It's where I came from my family I was brought up in a religious household and that's very important to me.

My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa even though everyone else did because we didn't have any money because Africa was the 'dark continent' and because I was a girl.

There's a sort of sibling moratorium when you're establishing yourself as an adult. So much of your energy has to be focused on other things like work and kids. But when people become more settled siblings tend to regroup because now you're building a new extended family.

On the one hand the idea of marriage and the sort of traditional family life repulses me. But on the other hand I long for it you know what I mean? I'm constantly in conflict with things. And it is because of my past and my upbringing and the journey that I've been on.

I wish I had an extra day with my mom sometimes. Or another hour in the day with my family husband and children.

My mom always said I was the peacemaker in the family. My older brother Eric was the leader the creative one. I was just his puppet.

I remember saying goodbye to my father the night he left to join the Navy. He didn't have to. He was older than other servicemen and had a family to support but he wanted to be a part of the fight against fascism not just make movies about it. I admired this about him.

South Central is just who I am. Even though I have a nice house nice family the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins my brothers my sisters they don't wanna move out.

Even though I have a nice house nice family the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins my brothers my sisters they don't wanna move out. They don't want to and they don't have the means to sustain it. That's where my heart is and that's what I think about all the time.

It has to be real and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society is because we don't acknowledge that family is important and it has to be people who are present you know and mothers and fathers both are not present enough with children.

I don't have anything against my mom but my family has no emotional connection to each other.

Choosing to be in the theatre was a way to put my roots down somewhere with other people. It was a way to choose a new family.

I'm considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family - father mother children - is fundamental to our civilisation.

I'm a strange mixture of my mother's curiosity my father who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility and my mother's father who was always in trouble with gambling debts.

I want to deal with somebody who comes from another country to the United States and has a family that comes. I don't care if it's a black family from Jamaica or a Hispanic family from Mexico. These issues need to be dealt with but they need to be dealt with in the entertaining way.

Because I didn't have brothers I was always interested in the kids down the street that had four brothers in their family so I became one of them - but it was not my family.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible.

I was the oldest of the children in my family. I had to do a lot of diaper-changing and lunch-making. I was taking my little sister to ballet picking up my brother sort of being a super-nanny.

Of course I will continue to share my favorite Southern recipes just like my mama grandmother and family shared with me over the years. And now I'll be adding a little bit of a lighter touch to some of these wonderful dishes.

I was the black sheep of the family and my mother never really understood me.

My mother was the first woman in the county in Indiana where we were born in Jay County to have a college degree. She was educated as a pianist and she wanted to concertize but when the war came she was married had a family so she started teaching.