My mom always said I was the peacemaker in the fam...

I imagine my children are going to save me from my vanity and be my passion and fill whatever fears I have of the amazing time I'm having right now being gone.

When you first have a baby your life doesn't change. I mean, you have a little less sleep and you drag these cuddly things around you and it's just amazing. But you still get to be you. Once they get to, like, five, six and school and it starts to get, like, 'Wow, they got real problems. They're my responsibility.' Oh my God. That is overwhelming.

I don't mean this in a stuck-up way, but I needed an attitude song.

As you age naturally, your family shows more and more on your face. If you deny that, you deny your heritage.

I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist - although the term had not reached Chile yet, so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me.

My inspiration was my mom. She's a great cook, and she still cooks, and we still banter back and forth about cooking. Growing up in a mostly Portuguese community, food was important and the family table was extremely important. At a very young age I understood that.

In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.

There are only two things a child will share willingly communicable diseases and its mother's age.

In Hollywood, you play a mom, and the next thing you know, you're on 'The Golden Girls.' They age you so fast.

When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.