It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers and I grew up in a very funny conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.

I've never had a very closely connected family. My parents split up when I was young and I was living with my mom for a little while then I was kind of just on my own really young. It wasn't some kind of global tragedy it was just never really a very close-knit family. So there was support in the sense that they didn't stand in my way.

My grandfather's family used to own a pasta factory in Naples and they would go door-to-door selling their pasta. So his love of food came from his parents which was then passed down to my mother and then again to me.

My family my parents are hippies.

My parents were drawn to the idea that there was space and opportunity in Australia. For the meagre sum of £10 you could sail your entire family out to Australia so that's what my father chose to do.

As a child the family that I had and the love I had from my two parents allowed me to go ahead and be more aggressive to search and to take risks knowing that if I failed I could always come home to a family of love and support.

My parents were French and Irish and our family even has Spanish blood-and I do so love the United States and consider myself part American.

I guess you could say I devoted myself so strongly to my music that for awhile I forgot about my family. But I only get one set of parents and I think I forgot about that for a little while.

We believed in our idea - a family park where parents and children could have fun- together.

To maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children. Each member of the family has to become in a special way the servant of the others.

Parents need all the help they can get. The strongest as well as the most fragile family requires a vital network of social supports.

When you have a godly husband a godly wife children who respect their parents and who are loved by their parents who provide for those children their physical and spiritual and material needs lovingly you have the ideal unit.

Maybe there is no actual place called hell. Maybe hell is just having to listen to our grandparents breathe through their noses when they're eating sandwiches.

My parents were both very intellectually honest straightforward and for them faith meant that you were fully engaged.

I had very supportive parents that made the way for me even at a time when there were very few women - no women really maybe two or three women - and very few fewer than that African-American women heading in this direction so there were very few people to look up to. You just had to have faith.

Since I was an atheist for many years and came to believe in God through my studies in science it frustrated me to see students and parents who viewed faith and science as enemies.

Thank goodness I had a great family growing up a great foundation. But I will say my faith my parents my family all that stuff is very very important. And I'll say that until the day I die.

Everything I am I owe to my faith and secondly to parents who were old school.

I looked at some of the statues of Jesus they were just stones with no life. When they said that God is three I was puzzled even more but could not argue. I believed it simply because I had to have respect for the faith of my parents.

The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical or infidels or agnostics or atheists.

My parents shared not only an improbable love they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name Barack or blessed believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.

It was seldom that I attended any religious meetings as my parents had not much faith in and were never so unfortunate as to unite themselves with any of the religious sects.

My work ethic came from my parents and my fear of failure. I came from a small predominantly black school and I didn't want to let them down.

As might be supposed my parents were quite poor but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot in life as indeed over anything.