“I think it’s really important to be present if you have children. I have a lot of…things to take care of.”

—Jared Leto, ES Magazine, 2017

“I try not to listen to the shoulds or coulds, and try to get beyond expectations, peer pressure, or trying to please—and just listen. I believe all the answers are ultimately within us. When I answered those questions regarding having children, I realized that so much of the pressure I was feeling was from outside sources, and I knew I wasn’t ready to take that step into motherhood.”

—Kim Cattrall, O Magazine, 2003

“I’m happy, but the fact that I’m not married and don’t have kids — it’s taken me a long time to get to a place where I actually am OK with that, where I actually don’t feel like I’m some sort of loser.”

—Rashida Jones, The Guardian, 2014

“I don’t like [the pressure] that people put on me, on women—that you’ve failed yourself as a female because you haven’t procreated. I don’t think it’s fair. You may not have a child come out of your vagina, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t mothering—dogs, friends, friends’ children. This continually is said about me: that I was so career-driven and focused on myself; that I don’t want to be a mother, and how selfish that is.”

—Jennifer Aniston, Allure, 2014

“Do you mean do I want to bring children into a world like this? If it happens, it happens. I’d prefer not to get into specifics about it, just because then it becomes something that is misquoted.”

—Leonardo DiCaprio, Rolling Stone, 2016

“I’m constantly asking myself questions, reminding myself, ‘Are you making that decision for you or someone else?’ The husband and the babies are the expectation of what’s supposed to happen at a certain point, and people fall back on, ‘Well, that’s the point of the human species, procreation.’ And I’m, like, ‘I think there are a lot of babies, isn’t that part of what’s going wrong, there’s too many?’ Some people could be working on the world being a better place, or just being happy.”

—Tracee Ellis Ross, The Times, 2018

“This is a little personal but I’m 42 and… Well, I was talking to my dad last year and saying, ‘What if I can’t have a kid?’ and he said, ‘There are other ways to have children in your life’. That’s true—and I get these amazing doses with my brother’s kids. But I’ve got to stop listening to other people. It’s crazy the stuff women will tell you.”

—Winona Ryder, The Telegraph, 2014

“I grew up in a big old family with eight kids younger than me and several of my brothers and sisters came to live with me early on in my life. I’ve loved their kids just like they’re my grandkids, and now I’ve got great-grand-kids! Now I’m GeeGee, which is great-granny. I often think, it just wasn’t meant for me to have kids so everybody’s kids can be mine.”

—Dolly Parton, People Country, 2014

“There comes some pressure in your mid-30s, and you think, ‘Am I going to have kids so I don’t miss out on something that other people really seem to love? Or is it that I really genuinely want to do this with my whole heart?’ I didn’t feel that my response was ‘yes’ to the latter. You have to really want to have kids, and neither of us did.”

—Portia de Rossi, Out, 2013

“I have no maternal instincts whatsoever. I am barren. I am bone-dry. When I see children, I feel nothing. I ovulate sand.”

—Margaret Cho, Revolution, 2003

“It’s too late. It’s over…I’m 52. I’m not going to have any kids.”

—Keanu Reeves, Esquire, 2017

“I don’t think I’d be a great mother … I don’t want to have a kid and have it raised by a nanny. I don’t have the time to raise a child.”

—Chelsea Handler, The Conversation With Amanda de Cadenet, 2013

“I wanted families [and] couples to know that it was a valid choice not to get on this crazy merry-go-round of IVF and tens and tens of thousands of dollars. I wanted people to feel—men and women—it’s okay to say, ‘I love my marriage, I love my life, I choose not to have children.'”

—Aisha Tyler, Huff Post Live, 2014

“It was not my destiny. I kept thinking it would be, waiting for it to happen, but it never did, and I didn’t care what people thought.”

—Helen Mirren, Vogue, 2013

“Motherhood has never been an ambition. I don’t think like that. I never have expectations like, ‘When I’m 19 I’m going to do this, and by the time I’ve hit 25 I’m going to do that.’ I just take things as they come, each day at a time, and if things happen, all well and good.”

—Renée Zellweger, London Times, 2008

“I was married to someone who was not cut-out to be a father. He could hardly take care of himself, let alone a child, so I changed my views, adapted accordingly, thought: It’s okay not to have children. Now I’m just going to watch how my life unfolds and see what happens. I’m not going to be less of a person if I don’t have children. It will work out the way it is supposed to.”

—Dita von Teese, The Independent, 2007

“As much as I enjoy other people’s children, my dogs have always been for me and my boyfriend our babies. I mean, we’re those types of people that people probably loathe if they overheard us the way we are with our dogs. But we both are very certain that not having married when we were younger and having children when we were younger was the right thing to do.”

—Janeane Garofalo, Middle Mojo, 2011

“It’s perfectly obvious the women are the ones trapped. I remember telling my mother when I was 7 or 8 that I was never going to get married or have children. To me, this is the way women get caught.”

—Mavis Leno, The Washington Post, 2014

“I’ve never wanted kids. But I do read about parenting a lot. For some reason it’s very interesting to me, I think because I’m just big on self-parenting.”

—Fiona Apple, Interview Magazine, 2012

“I’m sure many of the kids I knew as a child would have continued in show business, but they had kids of their own, had to do something dependable. I didn’t, so I could get by even in periods of unemployment.”

—Christopher Walken, The Guardian, 2013

“I work too much to be an appropriate parent. I feel like a bad mom to my dog some days because I’m just not here enough. I just feel like I would do a bad job if I took the time to literally give birth to a kid right now and try and juggle everything I’m doing.”

—Rachael Ray, People, 2007

“I never had a burning desire to have children. But then I met Nick, and I thought This is the only person I’d do this with. So we tried, but I was a little long in the tooth for that sort of thing. But we didn’t turn it into a soap opera. We tried for about a year or so, and it didn’t happen, and took that to mean it wasn’t meant to be.”

— Megan Mullally, GQ, 2017

“I’ve thought about this a lot lately. I never thought I’d be this age and not have kids. But my life has also gone in a million ways I never anticipated. I kept feeling like I’d wake up with absolute clarity, and I haven’t. And we have a pretty great life together. The chance that we’ll regret it doesn’t seem like a compelling enough reason to do it. I may wake up tomorrow with that lightning bolt, and I’ll have to scramble to make it happen.”

—Jennifer Westfeldt, New York Times, 2012

“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.”

—Oprah Winfrey, Hollywood Reporter, 2013

“I figured it was selfish for us to pour our resources into making our ‘own’ babies when those very resources and energy could not only help children already here, but through advocacy and service transform the world into a place where no child ever needs to be born into poverty and abuse again. My belief has not changed. It is a big part of who I am.”

—Ashley Judd, All That Is Bitter and Sweet: A Memoir, 2011

“I didn’t have a work ethic for such a long time. Imagine if I had a child like me? I didn’t start earning until I was 36. I’m the sort of person who has to check three times that I’ve shut the door, so I’d probably stare at a kid all day to check it was breathing.”

—Ricky Gervais, Red Magazine, 2009

“That’s perfectly fine for somebody who wants to. But at that time I didn’t want to—and I’m glad I don’t—have any children. God only knows what I would have done with them, poor things. I really do like kids, but there wouldn’t have been room in my life to raise children. I was so involved with my career and I would have had to give up the career in large part because I could not possibly have shortchanged the child.”

—Lily Tomlin, Metro Weekly, 2006

“It’s like, ‘Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover?’ With kids, your focus changes. I don’t want to go to PTA meetings.”

—Stevie Nicks, InStyle, 2002

“I’d be a terrible father! I see my friends who have children and I’m like, ‘Dude, how are you even upright, much less here at work at 6 a.m.?'”

—Jon Hamm, Us Weekly, 2012

“Of course I wonder what that would be like but, your destiny is your destiny and I can’t imagine, if by some miracle I got pregnant…at this point in my life, I wonder, could I even manage that? It would be a lie to say there’s not a bit of sadness there, but I don’t get caught up in it.”

—Kylie Minogue, The Sunday Times, 2018

“There have been times when I wanted children and other times I’ve been grateful not to have them. I am a mess if I have to say goodbye to my dog for longer than five days. I don’t know how I would deal with kissing my children as I left for work. I know there are women who are able to do that. I don’t know if I could.”

—Anjelica Huston, Cinema.com, 2011

“I don’t really want to have kids. It’s great because I don’t worry about when I should get pregnant—between seasons, while we’re shooting the show [Glow]—I don’t think about it every day. It would be nice, but I think of all the things that would be so stressful. I think about how much we’re involved in our cats’ lives. Oh my God, if it was a child!”

—Alison Brie, The Times of London, 2018

“I accepted it for a long time and I thought that ‘OK, I’m getting married. I’m having children. I’m definitely doing that, just not right now.’ I’d put in in the future and then, fortunately, the women’s movement came along and made me realize I was actually happy and that there were more ways to live than one.”

—Gloria Steinem, Feminist MAKERS Conference, 2014

“I want to have kids when there’s nothing else I want more, and I can make them my world. I figure, I’ll be a super-young-grandma age when I have kids. Grandparents are way more laid-back anyway. I’ll just go straight to grandmother-hood, like Diane Keaton.”

—Sarah Silverman, Daily Beast, 2010

“I love kids, but I’m very impulsive, and I was afraid that I would have children and then regret it.”

—Sarah Paulson, The Sunday Times Style, 2018

“I don’t know why women need to have children to be seen as complete human beings.”

—Marisa Tomei, Manhattan Magazine, 2009

“I would have been a terrible mother because I’m basically a very selfish human being. Not that that has stopped most people going off and having children.”

—Katharine Hepburn, Kate Remembered, 2003

“We’d probably be great parents. But it’s a human being, and unless you think you have excellent skills and have a drive or yearning in you to do that, the amount of work that that is and responsibility—I wouldn’t want to screw them up.”

—Ellen DeGeneres, People, 2014