My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.

You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it.

I would look at a dog and when our eyes met I realized that the dog and all creatures are my family. They're like you and me.

None of my actions have ever sort of been motored by the search for a husband or wondering if I was going to have a family someday or wanting to live in a really great house or thinking it would be really great to have a diamond.

'American Horror' is the debasement of the suburban family the way a lonely kid would have imagined it in the Seventies.

I have other obligations now - the show my family my life... though I know that without my sobriety I wouldn't have any of those things.

It never occurred to me that I wouldn't go to college and have a career - as well as a family - of my own. Both my parents but especially my mother encouraged me and led me to believe that it was possible.

For my own family I would always choose the makeshift surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.

I have often noticed that ancestors never boast of the descendants who boast of ancestors. I would rather start a family than finish one. Blood will tell but often it tells too much.

I was one those kids who had books on them. Before weddings Bar Mitzvahs funerals and anything else where you're actually meant to not be reading my family would frisk me and take the book away. If they didn't find it by this point in the procedure I would be sitting over in that corner completely unnoticed just reading my book.

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine.

By the time I was 30 nobody would work with me. I was friendless I was hopeless I was suicidal lost my family - I mean it was bad. Bottomed out didn't know what I was going to do. I actually thought I was going to be a chef - go to work in a kitchen someplace.

I'm often asked if I regret not going to Hollywood. I'm glad I didn't go because if I had I wouldn't have my extended family which is the fabric of my life. Only recently have I realised how special and unusual it is.

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.

I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.

I know my family and I would always go up to the mountains just for fun. We always skied. Then all of a sudden my brother started snow boarding. Older brother thing I had to do what he was doing. So I started snow boarding.

I think my father would have liked to have been an artist actually. But I think he didn't quite have perhaps the drive or I don't know I mean he had a family to bring up I suppose.

The blues was like that problem child that you may have had in the family. You was a little bit ashamed to let anybody see him but you loved him. You just didn't know how other people would take it.

Men have looked upon the desert as barren land the free holding of whoever chose but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it against aggression.

And when I was young my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

I was raised by a single mother who made a way for me. She used to scrub floors as a domestic worker put a cleaning rag in her pocketbook and ride the subways in Brooklyn so I would have food on the table. But she taught me as I walked her to the subway that life is about not where you start but where you're going. That's family values.

I'm surrounded by great friends and family. I don't know what I would do without them.

I would prefer to have no money but to have a nice family and good friends around.

I cannot remember a moment in my life when I have not felt the love of my family. We were a family that would have killed for each other - and we still are.