Some of the worst things that have happened in my career, like things getting leaked, have actually been what's best for me, because people knew when I was on that show that I was really growing up.

I always say the minute I stop making mistakes is the minute I stop learning and I've definitely learned a lot.

I told my mom, 'I'm not buying another magazine until I can get past this thought of looking like the girl on the cover'. She said, ""Miley, you are the girl on the cover,' and I was, like, 'I know, but I don't feel like that girl every day.' You can't always feel perfect.

Every career thing I do can't be perfect and sometimes my decisions are wrong.

I'm not the world's best mother, though kids always assume I must be.

The great lesson my mother and father gave me was almost invisible. It was a strong sense of being rooted.

Even though my mom was talented and had a college degree, she lived in the era when the conventional wisdom in Dallas was that my dad worked, she was supposed to stay home and take care of the kids, and that was that. There really weren't other opportunities for her, and most of them were volunteer opportunities.

My family is Chinese-Taiwanese. I'm from Richmond, Virginia. The community in which I grew up was pretty white. The storybooks you got at school featured white children and an animal, or animals, and as you got older, the novels you were assigned were about, like, the problems of white boys and their dogs.