I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.

The Royal Family are not like you and me. They live in houses so big that you can walk round all day and never need to meet your spouse. The Queen and Prince Philip have never shared a bedroom in their lives. They don't even have breakfast together.

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

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.

You know most people they want to go to Hollywood. They want to be a star. They want to be a rock star. That thought never entered any of our minds the Van Halen family.

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

A lot of parents never speak to their transgender kids again that's not the case in my family.

You never know when some small thing will lead to a big idea. Travel is very inspirational - but it's in the ordinary that I find my themes of love and work and family.

My father never talked about the sacrifices that the family made for me.

My work's never been accepted by my family but it's something I'll always carry on with.

As a novelist I mined my history my family and my memory but in a very specific way. Writing fiction I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

I'm still very connected to my family to the world I grew up in. I understand what it means to be afraid that you can't pay a doctor's bill. Or to have to make the choice between buying a band uniform for a seventh-grader and making the insurance payment on time. That will never leave me. It was how I lived until I was well into my adult years.

My family is my life and I'll never lose that.

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.

A family is very special. So when a family splits up it's not good it's never good.

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.

When you look at a family if you have a family that never interacts with each other never has strong conversation with each other never has disagreements nine times out of ten you have a very cold family and they're not going to be at the end they're not going to be close.

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.

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.

But when you lose a family member or something tragic happens that stays with you forever. You never get over it. Knowing that you have to deal with that for the rest of your life... Football is important but not as important as you once thought it was.

Even if you plan a marriage and a family you are never quite prepared for the reality versus how you imagined it. In a lot of ways it's better and in a lot of ways it's worse. That's life right?

We were never a family that had a lot. We had enough but not a lot.

Whenever I have friends over we end up eating and talking and losing track of time and once in a while singing karaoke. It reminds me of the family meals we had in Russia which always lasted a very long time. That's a tradition I miss.

Music was your real passion this thing you held dear even above family. It was this relationship that never betrayed you. Once it became your job - this thing that was highly visible this thing that became about commerce - that's when you were holding onto music like it was a palm tree in a hurricane.