Oprah Winfrey reveals why she never had kids

During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter for the magazine's Women in Entertainment issue, Oprah Winfrey wasn't shy about honestly revealing why she never had children.

"If I had kids, my kids would hate me," the 59-year-old media mogul admitted. "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."

Winfrey, who just received a Screen Actors Guild nomination for her role in Lee Daniel's The Butler, also admitted that even as a little girl, she had other things on her mind besides motherhood.

"Gayle [King, Winfrey's best friend and now a mother of two] was the kind of kid who, in seventh grade Home Ec class, was writing down her name and the names of her children," Winfrey recalled. "While she was having those kind of daydreams, I was having daydreams about how I could be Martin Luther King."

Though Winfrey chose not to have children of her own, she has certainly become a mother figure to her students at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, a school that she established in January 2007. Not only does she visit the school twice a year, but she tells THR that she also starts every day answering emails from the students.

"I'm responding to everything from 'I'm feeling lost' to 'I need advice about a boy,'" she said.

Turns out she's the surrogate mother of thousands of girls who need her.