Mom

I never thought about college, but my mom thought about it for me. I knew 100 percent it wasn't for me.

When my first semester grades came out, my mom and dad told me I wouldn't be playing football.

People think I have courage. The courage in my family are my wife Pam, my three daughters, here, Nicole, Jamie, LeeAnn, my mom, who's right here too.

No matter how good you are, at some point your kids are gonna have to create their own independence and think that Mom and Dad aren't cool, just to establish themselves. That's what adolescence is about. They're gonna go through that no matter what.

And the greatest lesson that mom ever taught me though was this one. She told me there would be times in your life when you have to choose between being loved and being respected. Now she said to always pick being respected.

It was my 16th birthday - my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do - write songs and sing them to people.

My mom is definitely my rock.

I was always at peace because of the way my mom treated me.

My mother worked in factories, worked as a domestic, worked in a restaurant, always had a second job.

I was a brownie for a day. My mom made me stop. She didn't want me to conform.

Motherhood is at its best when the tender chords of sympathy have been touched.

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

I auditioned on my own. I tried to make a mark for myself without anybody's help, not even Mom's.

My mother taught me about the power of inspiration and courage, and she did it with a strength and a passion that I wish could be bottled.

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.

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

Mothers are the necessity of invention.

I am truly my mother's son.

The biggest surprise, which is also the best, is that I didn't know I would love motherhood as much as I do.

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.