My father was a self-employed textile agent, and the shop below his office was an art gallery.

I worked as an accountant in an auditor's office, at a textile showroom, a telephone booth, and a fast-food joint while studying. My dad found it odd, but he never interfered in any of my decisions.

Because America doesn't have a strong textile industry anymore, we have to bring things like fabrics, zippers, and color tape into the U.S., and having so many elements involved in production adds to the amount of waste. You might have some things coming from Italy, a button coming from China, or lining coming from Korea; it's just endless.

One of the awesome things about being a writer is that I can research nearly anything - tea? Bubblegum? Ants? Neurology? Chocolate? Textile production? It doesn't matter. It's all productive work.

I'm not suggesting that microbial cellulose is going to be a replacement for cotton, leather or other textile materials. But I do think it could be quite a smart and sustainable addition to our increasingly precious natural resources.

There are children who are working in textile businesses in Asia who would be prostitutes on the streets if they did not have those jobs.

The next time you're driving from New York to Boston on I-95, you should make a little detour in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to visit the Old Slater Mill national historic landmark. It's the site of what is considered to be the first successful water-powered textile spinning mill in America.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

My father was into textile painting and ran a small business. He encouraged me a lot and loved seeing my plays.

Baba Seva - Seva Efraimovna Gekhtman - was born in a small town in Ukraine in 1919. Her father was an accountant at a textile factory, and her mother was a nurse. Her parents moved to Moscow with her and her brothers when she was a child.

My grandmother had a cupboard where she kept her collections and textile samples of all sorts of things. When I had good grades, I could take out one piece of work to look at.

I am all in favor of growing the American economy and engaging in trade with the world, but not at the expense of American workers. The North American Free Trade Agreement is a perfect example of this. Ask the textile workers of North Carolina how NAFTA worked out for them - if you can find any.

My father was an engineer working for a textile company that had several factories scattered in rural towns in the southern part of Japan.

I'd grown up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, a place hard hit by the offshoring of numerous heavy industries - steel, textile, shipbuilding.

We're not handling things anymore before they arrive on our doorstep. I like to feel how thin porcelain can be, run my hand over a textile, see if I want to sit in a chair.

My family was in two businesses - they were in the textile business, and they were in the candy business. The conversations around the dinner table were all about the factory floor and how many machines were running and what was happening in the business. I grew up very engaged in manufacturing and as part of a family business.

I fear that CAFTA will accelerate the demise of these domestic textile jobs.

China's idea of fair trade is government subsidies of its textile and apparel exports to the United States, currency manipulation, and forgiveness of loans by its government banks.

To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke.

In almost every case, whenever a tariff or quota is imposed on imports, that tax is strongly supported by the domestic industry getting the protective shield from lower-priced foreign competition. The sugar industry supports sugar tariffs; textile mills lobby for tariffs on foreign clothing.