Emma Walton Hamilton

We certainly had our moments when I was growing up. But the great thing was, if Mom was working on a night shoot, she'd be up making breakfast before school.

The arts are the most uniquely suited to provide young people with critical-thinking skills, problem-solving, teamwork and collaboration, empathy and tolerance and compassion, looking at the other point of views.

The arts give kids the building blocks with which to then play.

My mom's coping mechanism was to be strong and resilient. She is very compassionate and nonjudgmental.

I have a picture of me sitting on the step of a brownstone stoop with my mom and all the Muppets around us. And Perry Como, for some reason.

I was able to hide a lot behind ‘Walton,' and found that to be quite useful."

I think writing and reading are completely synergistic; not necessarily in that one has to be a good reader to be a good writer or vice versa, but that they so inform each other.

My husband, Steve Hamilton - an actor/producer and co-Director of the Southampton Playwriting Conference - and I had been working in the theatre in New York for many years.

Stony Brook is a phenomenal university and I am proud to be affiliated with it, so it is gratifying to be able to support this wonderful institution in whatever way I can.

And for me I think I was originally a theater person, a producer/director/actor.

My parentage set me up to want to make a life of my own in the arts, but also contributed to my feeling a certain amount of pressure, especially in my early years, to figure out who I was and how to make my own mark.

I think that at a certain point in our lives we should have to interview our parents.