The 59-year-old talk show queen says she has no regrets about remaining childless, insisting her kids would have “suffered” because they would always come second to her work.
“If I had kids, my kids would hate me,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “They would have ended up on the equivalent of The Oprah Winfrey Show talking about me; because something would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them.”
Oprah says she’s never been the type of woman who daydreamed about starting a family, unlike her best friend Gayle King who has always wanted to be a mum.
“Gayle was the kind of kid who, in seventh grade, was writing down her name and the names of her children,” Oprah said.
“While she was having those kind of daydreams, I was having daydreams about how I could be Martin Luther King.”
Oprah Winfrey on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter.
Oprah has previously spoken about why she has never married Stedman, her boyfriend of 27 years. She said she would die a “never-married woman” because she could never behave like a traditional “wife”.
“If you ever interviewed him, he would tell you that had we married, we would not be together today,” Oprah said. “Because he’s a traditional man and this is a very untraditional relationship.
“I think it’s acceptable as a relationship, but if I had the title ‘wife’, I think there would be other expectations for what a wife is and what a wife does. First of all, you’ve got to come home sometimes.”
