Mum and Dad used to do a lot of entertaining. We had quite a nice house, so everybody descended on us at Christmas - aunts and uncles, who weren't even aunts and uncles.
I call on those that call me son, Grandson, or great-grandson, On uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts, To judge what I have done. Have I, that put it into words, Spoilt what old loins have sent?
When I was a kid, we had this great advantage of there being no YA books. You read kid books and then went on to adult books. When I was 12 or 13, I read all of Steinbeck and Hemingway. I thought I should read everything a writer writes.
It's our job - as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles - to find books our kids are going to like.
I had a wonderful family including my aunts, uncles and cousins but they've all gone to heaven.
Whenever the kindly uncles and aunts came over for a cup of tea and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, it was always the same: an 'authoress', and illustrate my own books.
Apache have the strongest nation in the world behind them. So we're going to inflict pain where our European aunts and uncles had to endure it. And so the fact that you could actually get Nazis scared of a band of Jews, that's - again, that's a gigantic psychological thing.
Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'être. Virtually all of our aunts and uncles had Ph.D.s in science or engineering, and it was taken for granted that the next generation of Chu's were to follow the family tradition. When the dust had settled, my two brothers and four cousins collected three MDs, four Ph.D.s and a law degree. I could manage only a single advanced degree.
My parents had become adults during the Great Depression, as had many of my aunts and uncles, so I got stories from all of them. They are fastened up inside me, and now and again, they have to come out.
Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else; if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source.
Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.
My mother and father had been through the Holocaust. The family was wiped out. I grew up never knowing aunts, uncles, or grandparents.
Growing up in Georgia, it was sort of the last place to jump on the bandwagon of the integrated frontier. I have aunts and uncles and grandparents that experienced the 'whites only' and segregated schools.
I have a big family. Even though it's only three kids in our family, it's always aunts and uncles and the whole thing.
One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't think you would say to yourself, 'Oh my God, something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.'
If you've ever had to recall your past in some way and you open a drawer of old photographs that your parents kept, there are always pictures of you smiling and charming, and then a bunch of people you don't know who they are. Could be aunts, uncles, could be the postman for all you know. Who are these people? Your parents are never in the picture, because they are the ones taking them. So you've got these unrelated images that are disconnected from your memories.