When I was five years old, I told my parents that I wanted to take ballet. So, ballet was the focus of my life... until puberty. Then I discovered boys and started dating a guy with a mohawk who'd com...
When I was 19 years old, both of my parents died in the same year; my mom of cancer and my dad in a car accident. Through the next two or three years and a series of bad decisions - all my own, I migh...
My parents divorced when I was 3 years old. They had a lounge act in Las Vegas, where I was born. The band broke up and the marriage dissolved, and my mother, my sister and I moved to Southern Califor...
I grew up in a small town in Washington State, so I wasn't really aware of costume design as a career growing up, but I loved clothes. I remember I saved all my money, and the first thing that I bough...
Growing up in New York with artist parents - a very liberal environment, where we were always encouraged to challenge the status quo - I think for a long time I confused jingoism with patriotism. And...
I think I've wanted to be an actress since the day I was born. I even asked my parents for an agent for my seventh birthday!
Yes, I grew up with guns. For my 16th birthday, in fact, I received a .357 instead of a car. But there was nothing playful about them; they were tools. My parents went through a back-to-the-land phase...
Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movem...
I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure, so I went to medical sch...
I signed schoolboy forms for Watford when I was 12, but then my parents got divorced, and I never kicked a ball for three years. I rebelled, I left home, but getting back into football sorted me out....
The only big things I've purchased are my dad's heart valve and a Rolls-Royce for my parents, for their anniversary. And that was only because my dad had a Lady Gaga license plate on our old car and i...
My parents taught me never to judge others based on whom they love, what color their skin is, or their religion.
Create a garden; bring children to farms for field trips. I think it's important that parents and teachers get together to do one or two things they can accomplish well - a teaching garden, connecting...
When my parents were getting divorced, I just said to myself, 'Go to sleep, and tomorrow you can go skiing.' I cried myself to sleep, and in the morning I was up on the mountain, and I was good.
Declining to go to church with my parents in the morning, I would ostentatiously set out for the Monist Society in the afternoon, down an obscure street which it seemed a little improper to be walking...
My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to...
Grades can matter, especially for those students and parents who live for the next round of applications to graduate or professional schools. But there's a problem with the grade emphasis. Math or sci...
My parents wanted me to be a doctor. So I took up science, but then realised that my heart was not in it at all. The thought of treating ailing people was very depressing.
One of the greatest features of science is that it doesn't matter where you were born, and it doesn't matter what the belief systems of your parents might have been: If you perform the same experiment...
I associate the truest spirit of Christmas with certain years when I had to spend it at my parents' house as an adult who had, presumably, escaped.