My parents always taught me that my day job would never make me rich; it'd be my homework.

When I was younger, even though I had a big brother, my parents would give me the house key every day.

My parents have always been very supportive. Whenever any of them says they are proud of me that's the highlight of my day!

Every single day, my parents fed me balls. Eventually it turned into having a coach, and then it went to being at an academy. You know, it worked out pretty well.

When I'm around the kids I feel like I act the most grown-up just because you're supposed to. And I say things, like every other day, that remind me of my own parents.

When I say 'homeschooled,' I was homeschooled for, like, two years, and then we just stopped. It was me and my parents, and they'd give me homework and stuff like that, but then one day, they just stopped.

During my school days, I'd tell my friends that one day I would be a television star. But my parents weren't too keen about me venturing into acting. Eventually, they gave in and allowed me to start modelling.

I first went on YouTube aged 15, and people were saying, 'Why not do this cover?' Then they wanted to hear my own stuff live, and it escalated from there. Selena Gomez's parents found my videos and manage me to this day.

That was more or less coincidental in the sense that my parents wanted me to come back to New York because that's the center of musical activity still to this day, more or less, and so I auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera.

A misperception about anorexia is that you don't eat. Not true. Maybe you eat just 500 calories a day. It would be easy for me to say, 'Why didn't my parents notice?' But I didn't want them to. I made sure to eat half a sandwich around my parents.

An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.

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