“There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.”

“But listen to me, all three of you, n hear this if you don't hear nothing else: everything I did, I did for love . . . the love a natural mother feels for her children. That's the strongest love there is in the world, and it's the deadliest. There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.”

“I was being paid to do what I loved, and there's no gig on earth better than that; it's like a license to steal.”

“When I was a kid, my mother said, ‘Stephen if you were a girl, you’d always be pregnant.”

“I know your mother lives in your head - almost everyone's mother does, I guess - but you can't let her have her way on this one”

“You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away.”

“Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive. Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.”