Maria Sharapova Quotes

New Labour needs to realise that family life and the way we raise our children are private matters.

If I hadn't gone to dancing school, I would have married and had children like my mum and had a normal life.

I was born in Leningrad, U.S.S.R., before my father got an appointment at a university in Italy and we moved to Italy. I spend a few years there before my family returned to Russia.

Getting out of Russia was the best thing my parents did. I mean, that country will never amount to anything.

My only real contact with what my father did was that he could get 16-millimeter prints, so every weekend we would show two or three movies at home. But our house wasn't frequented by stars. My father's personal life was his personal life, and it was separate from his professional life.

The thing is, I grew up in L.A., so I had this unique opportunity to live in both communist Russia and see that life, and then move to America as a young girl and experience a completely different life.

My parents came from Russia and suddenly they wound up in Boston, Massachusetts, Brookline, Massachusetts and they felt the sun rose and set on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's backside because he meant so much to them. This was freedom. This was something totally different from the Russia they had left.

All I want to do is to go to America, get married and start a new life.

Personally, fame never really played any part in our family life.

It is extremely interesting to live in a private house and to see the externalities, at least, of domestic life in a Japanese middle-class home.

Not everybody even gets to live with their own family because they have to go to L.A. or New York or wherever to work and find a job and leave their family back home. But every day, I get to work with my family - if I want to.

Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic.

My two boys were the same ages as the kids in the show. In real life or in between the breaks I was raising two kids off camera who were not unlike the two kids who were being paid to be my kids.

I used to tell people my father was a plumber, because that would mean we had a normal life.

So as my kids will tell you, they had a pretty normal life.

We go to college, live together or marry, and have kids - often with little more thought to the daily routines of raising children than our grandparents gave them, when women by and large stayed at home.

I live life what I consider to be normal.

I was born in Hereford, England, in 1944. We moved when they had an opportunity to get a visa, about 1950. My dad always thought Europe was a bit too small for him. He wanted to see the United States... The typical immigrant story. He wanted a better life for his children, too. He always tried to get the visa, and it didn't come up.

We just moved out of L.A. because I didn't want to be raising my girls in the city. They're in public school now and they're in a normal situation. We're sort of settling into that. It's just a choice.

My family lives a pretty normal life.

I don't know how other people perceive the lives of actors, but my life is fairly ordinary. I go to work, I come home, I put my kids to bed. If I'm home in time for dinner, I have dinner, and then it's bedtime.

The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.

It is obvious that the role of the father as the central authority in the family has been considerably challenged in Western societies. Parental responsibilities, and I knowingly use the term responsibility instead of the term authority still used in the French Civil code, are nowadays shared equally between both parents.

Having a family has made a huge difference in the roles I take, so doing a show in L.A. is a huge factor.

My parents and my brother and I left the Soviet Union in 1981. I was six, and Dima was sixteen, and that made all the difference. I became an American, whereas Dima remained essentially Russian.