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I was into opera as a kid - I do play Carmen and sing and dance. My mom signed me up for a theater group before preschool, and I never looked back.

I begged my mom to let me start skating.

I would make my mom buy me the toy doctor kit.

I was born and raised in the high desert of Nevada in a tiny town called Searchlight. My dad was a hard rock miner. My mom took in wash. I grew up around people of strong values - even if they rarely talked about them.

I remember my mom saying to me that what your friends do is one thing, but what you do could be on the front page of the paper.

I have looked at pictures that my mom has of me, from when I was four years old at the turntable. I am there, reaching up to play the records. I feel like I was bred to do what I do. I have been into music, and listening to music and critiquing it, my whole life.

My mom has this great skiing event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, every year for a local charity.

I suddenly had this really mad desire to have an affair with a woman. I was divorced. I was childless. I figured there is got to be one more way to really tick off my mom.

My mom is in her mid-60s and has more energy and is more youthful than any human being I know. It is pretty incredible.

I do not think I would have been able to stick with it and been proud of who I am and be feminine out on the court. I think I would have folded to the peer pressure if I did not have my mom to encourage me to be me and be proud of how tall I am.

For me, being tall was very positive because I thought my mom was the most beautiful person ever.

My mom did not ever think I would take to acting because I was a very shy, very reserved kind of child. But obviously, something changed!

I was watching TV at age 9 or 10, and my mom said that I came from the front room and I told her that I want to act. And she said if you want to do this at 18, then you can. It was a very simple story, yet, I do not even remember the conversation that I had with my mother. Until she reminded me of the story many years later.

I have always wanted to be an actress, ever since I was a little girl. I always played the mom and I played my sister as the daughter. I wanted to be an actress on television and movies instead of just around the house.

My dad named me Dakota and my mom came up with my first name Hannah. So it is Hannah Dakota Fanning.

I did not really know what I wanted to do, and then I got this call from a casting director in Los Angeles. She remembered me from something years before, and she called my mom wanting me to audition for this thing.

My mom would be leaving the house and she'd say, Do not you pull out all of the old dresses in the attic and put on a show again! And the door would close, and that is exactly what I do do. The show was calling me!

I do believe that there are African Americans who have thick accents. My mom has a thick accent my relatives have thick accents. But sometimes you have to adjust when you go into the world of film, TV, theatre, in order to make it accessible to people.

My mom once lost track of me at the zoo and when she found me I was lecturing a man about the difference between dromedary and Bactrian camels. I was about 3 1/2.

Work ethic has always been stressed in my family. My dad is going to be 80 years old and he still works part time. My mom just retired a couple years ago and she is in her mid- to late 70s.