Oprah Winfrey never became a parent and she has explained why.
"I didn't want babies. I wouldn't have been a good mom for babies," she says in an interview for Good Housekeeping UK in its April issue. "I don't have the patience. I have the patience for puppies, but that's a quick stage."
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Winfrey, who has been with her partner, Stedman Graham, since 1986, says leading the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls gave her the role of mother figure.
"When people were pressuring me to get married and have children, I knew I was not going to be a person that ever regretted not having them, because I feel like I am a mother to the world's children."
"Love knows no boundaries. It doesn't matter if a child came from your womb or if you found that person at age two, 10 or 20. If the love is real, the caring is pure and it comes from a good space, it works."
Winfrey says being a mentor for 172 students at the girls-only boarding school in Johannesburg was the equivalent of having her own children.
"It is more rewarding that I would ever have imagined," she said. "I was doing this to help them, but it has brought a light to my life that I can't explain."
When Winfrey was 14 she gave birth to a son who died a few weeks later in hospital.
Winfrey has previously spoken about not being a parent.
In 2013 she told the Hollywood Reporter: "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."