We are each of us angels with only one wing and we can only fly by embracing one another.

That's what the holidays are for - for one person to tell the stories and another to dispute them. Isn't that the Irish way?

Every St. Patrick's Day every Irishman goes out to find another Irishman to make a speech to.

Let our New Year's resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity in the finest sense of the word.

Who's a boy gonna talk to if not his mother?

My mother is a walking miracle.

Motherhood is... difficult and... rewarding.

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.

Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.

When my mother had to get dinner for 8 she'd just make enough for 16 and only serve half.

The babe at first feeds upon the mother's bosom but it is always on her heart.

I got to grow up with a mother who taught me to believe in me.

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

Most people outside of America won't get it. It's the Easter bunny. It's another lie and I don't understand why we had to invent this character.

In our racist sexist society Christmas is the 8 hours when we stop killing each other and gratutious over eating is encouraged so that the starving and other people in the world can die!

The upheavals of adolescence silenced 'A Christmas Carol' for a few years. I became a firebrand atheist. Christmas - humbug! Too commercial! Then I became an agnostic. Christmas was a pro-forma affair basically a chore. Buy mother a book dad a new tie my brother and sister small gifts. Pretend thanks for the fountain pens and shirts I received.

Dad bought me a toy drum one Christmas and I eventually destroyed it. I wanted a real drum and he bought me a snare drum. Dad continued to buy me one drum after the other.

Yeah I started when I was 6 years old. My brother and sister would get all of these presents at Christmas time from the cast and crew of their show and I was jealous. So I decided that I had to become an actor.

My father died when I was young and I was raised by my grandmother Emma Klonjlaleh Brown. We could afford to eat chicken just once a year on Christmas.

I was thrilled one year when I was younger when not only did my brothers get hockey sticks for Christmas - but I did too!

I had eight brothers and sisters. Every Christmas my younger brother Bobby would wake up extra early and open everybody's presents - everybody's - so by the time the rest of us got up all the gifts were shredded ribbons off torn open and thrown aside.

It's hard and sometimes it's scary. It still amazes my mother. I went home for Christmas one year and there were fans all over the front lawn hoping to see me.

My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.

May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff shrinks would say. I was eight and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast.