“Gayle [now a mother of two] was the kind of kid who, in seventh grade Home Ec class, was writing down her name and the names of her children. While she was having those kind of daydreams, I was having daydreams about how I could be Martin Luther King.[...]If I had kids, my kids would hate me. They would have ended up on the equivalent of the Oprah show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them.”
Is it even possible for a woman to be successful as Oprah and be able to balance her career with motherhood and marriage? In Oprah’s own words, ‘You can have it all, just not all at once.’ Peep a few more excerpts from O’s interview below:”
On if she’ll do Broadway
“It’s something I would like to do, but I’d like to get settled in my house, have a life and then make the next move. I’d just like to be in the space where I really feel like I have nothing to prove.” Is she close? “I think I’m just about there.”
On Stedman keeping it real with her while she was being slammed in the press
"He would say, 'You think you're going to rest on your laurels? You think anybody cares about 25 years?' And I'd go, 'Yeah, I kinda felt people did. Twenty-five years means nothing?' Same thing happened with Gayle. I said, 'I heard people were counting me out.' And she goes, 'No. You were counted out.' "[...]“This has been the great climb of my life,” she says of the past three years. “But I still have a long way to go.”
Her advice to new talk-show hosts like Steve Harvey and Queen Latifah
“Don’t do it until you have 100 percent creative control to be yourself.” When she sensed that Harvey was straying, she called him up and told him, “I saw you in a chocolate factory trying to do that routine that Lucy and Ethel did. That’s not you. Don’t let people talk you into what they think is you.”
When [my producers] called me in and said, ‘I know, we could take the audience to outer space,’ I knew it was time to go.
On giving generously ever since she was a kid “I’d collect [my lunch money] in a little cup and take it back to church on Sunday to give to the starving children of Costa Rica. I always felt that whatever you have, you have to share it.”
On giving money to family and friends over the years
“When you’re the most successful person in your family, in your neighborhood and in your town, everybody thinks you’re the First National Bank and you have to figure out for yourself where those boundaries are.[...]I got to the point where nobody ever asked me for anything less than $5,000. I felt pressured for a long time to say yes, because I thought, ‘I can’t lie and say I don’t have it. My salary is printed in the paper,’ ” she laughs, looking back at all her charity: “I’ve bought more houses and cars than I can even tell you.”
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