When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.
I definitely had a very religious upbringing. My father was just instilling good morals into us at a very young age, and it wasn’t super-strict, but it was a loving, warm household.
I respect my father as a father, but I also respect him as an honorable chairman.
My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.
My father died when I was young, and my mother, Ruth, went to work in an office selling theater and movie parties. She put me through private school, Horace Mann, in Riverdale. She sent me to camp so that I would learn to compete. She was a lioness, and I was her cub.
My father was a dreamer – my hero. He was a smart, tough guy from Poland, a cutter of lady’s handbags, an old socialist-unionist who always considered himself a failure. His big line was: ‘Don’t end up like me.’
That’s the great thing about New Year’s, you get to be a year older. For me, that wasn’t such a joke, because my birthday was always around this time. When I was a kid, my father used to tell me that everybody was celebrating my birthday. That’s what the trees are all about.
It’s not easy being a father, but I’ve been allowed a comeback.
As a parent, I’d – I’d be a better father.
When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.
My father helped me leave. He said, ‘It’s all out there, it’s not here.’
My aunty says I’m the double of my father. He was a workaholic, which I’ve definitely inherited. And like me, he could be the life and soul of the party, but also quite withdrawn.
Even though my father was a radio comedian, it wasn’t cool to say, at a young age, ‘I want to be a comedian.’
My roots were in acting. That’s all I wanted to be. Even though my father was a radio comedian, it wasn’t cool to say, at a young age, ‘I want to be a comedian.’
My father suffered much and toiled painfully all his life, for he had no resources other than the proceeds of his trade from which to support himself and his wife and family.
My father made sure of discipline, but my mum, she was serious business.
Mitch Hurwitz was like a father figure to me. He was so sweet, and he’s just so smart.
It is absolutely ludicrous that abortion supporters would accuse a blood relative of Dr. King of hijacking the King legacy. Uncle Martin and my father, Rev. A. D. King were blood brothers. How can I hijack something that belongs to me? I am an heir to the King Family legacy.
Many, including the Canadian and U.S. governments, try to provide family support while also maintaining a hard line about further fuelling terrorism and hostage-taking through ransom payments … Still, try telling that to a mother, or a father, or a husband or wife caught in the powerless agony of standing by.
I decided to see how my voice sounds on different type of records. So I did Eminem and the Biggie, Florence and the Machine, and Muse covers. A couple of them just came from some jam sessions between me and my sister in her bedroom at my father’s house in San Diego.
My father actually moved out from Chicago just so he could play tennis 365 days a year, so it was – it was a place we played every day. We played before school. We played after school. We woke up. We played tennis. We brushed our teeth in that order.
I loved riding bikes and horses. I was eight when I started having lessons, and when my father bought me my own horse I couldn’t wait to go off on my own.
My father was against the death penalty, and that was hard in the Son of Sam summer when fear was driving the desire for the death penalty.
I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.
It was a fairly happy childhood. My father was working away, and my mum brought up five kids all on her own.
My father was interested in justice, always working for people who needed to be supported.
Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.
She was trusted and valued by her father, loved and courted by all dogs, cats, children, and poor people, and slighted and neglected by everybody else.
East of Eden’ is an important story for me. It’s about a kid that’s misunderstood and feels like he’s not loved by his father. It’s a very father-son kind of story, and it’s not until the end that they sort of make up. I like that because every boy has trouble with his father, so it’s very relatable.
Mandela is just the eternal man. You want that man to be around forever. It’s the closest thing we have to God, I think. He’s the father of mankind, almost.
My father is Hungarian and moved to Britain during the uprising, and my Spanish mum comes from Galicia they moved here at the end of the Fifties.
When I meet someone from the army background, there is an instant connection. We live in the best five-star hotels of the world, but outside my home I will be equally comfortable in any army cantonment or army guest house. Telling my friends that my father was in the army was like telling them that he is the second-richest man in the world.
My life has always been with my dad. Since I can remember, I was raised by my father my entire life. So he’s kind of been that mom and father figure – always.
If it wasn’t for my sport and my father, I’d probably be a fallen statistic. I’d be dead I’d be in jail. Luckily, I had a great dad in my life.
I believe my father has and always will be the strongest influence in my life, as he has guided me on many paths.
My father is 100% Japanese and came to the United States when he was only 18 years old. My grandmother still resides in Japan, which has allowed me to travel to the roots of my ancestors with my father.
Every boy grows up trying to be like his father, but what if a boy grows up to be like his mother?
My father is a genuinely nice guy and very generous to anybody and everybody. He likes to live life kingsize, and he doesn’t know any other way, and I love that about him.
I think of my parents as a single unit, and it’s interesting because they shared so much, and they were totally opposite. My mother, a Martha Graham dancer, had a classical background my father had a back-porch background.
As a child singer, I never sang a single track for my father or uncle.
When it comes to advice, I always consult my father regarding everything, as he has seen the industry inside out, and he is the best person to guide me.
Young people know how important it is for dads to be involved in their lives. As I travel the country and talk with students, some of them tell me that their lives would be totally different if their father was around.
I’m a father to four kids, so it bothers me that even though our children think big naturally, our society systematically trains them out of thinking that way.
I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.
A Western woman is not her brother’s or her father’s property. She’s just herself. She can choose her own lifestyle. But in a Muslim family, the honor of the man is between the legs of a woman.
You have to let individuals make their own choices and respect that, even if it’s your own child. And that’s what was taken away from me. My father passed away thinking I still had to go back to his way of believing.
I inherited the company from my father after he died very unexpectedly from a heart attack in 1966. He was just 51 years old, and I was 21.
When I travel with my kids abroad, I am not myself, but I’m more a father who wants to protect them. Sometimes, I am even aggressive about certain things and get surprised seeing myself like that: for instance, when people want to take pictures of them. I am fine if they want to take my pictures, but they are not public property.
I am a friend when I need to be a friend, a father when I need to be a father, a musician when music calls. I switch roles accordingly.
I was raised Catholic, but my father’s people were Methodist, so we went to both churches.
My father… removed from Kentucky to… Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up… Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher… but that was all.
My mother pretty much raised me to be a free spirit. Anything my father would say, she would tell me, ‘No, it’s like this.’
Feels good to try, but playing a father, I’m getting a little older. I see now that I’m taking it more serious and I do want that lifestyle.
Now that I’m a parent, I understand why my father was in a bad mood a lot.
I’ve been called a moron since I was about four. My father called me a moron. My grandfather said I was a moron. And a lot of times when I’m driving, I hear I’m a moron. I like being a moron.
When you’re around the kids, you feel like you act the most grown up just because you’re supposed to lead. I say things, like every other parent, that reminds you of your own parents. One thing I do know about being a parent, you understand why your father was in a bad mood a lot.
If we have George W. Bush as president, we’re going to go back to the kind of policies we had when his father and Ronald Reagan were president.
Like myself, President Obama is the father of two daughters. He understands the obstacles that they face as women, but he also understands the emergency of the state of young black men in America.
My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.
My father sang well, and he was a handsome man. When he walked down the street, people sometimes mistook him for Cary Grant and asked for his autograph.
When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
My father would chaperone at high-school dances, and the toughest guy in the high school used to want to fight my father. My father broke his hand on a guy’s head once in school.
For me, the most important thing that I have to accomplish is to be a good father. That’s the most difficult challenge of my life. That’s the most important thing for me, more than films.
When my father died, I did not cry. When my cat died three days later, I cried a lot.
I was 19 when my father died from a heart attack. He was a 55-year-old college professor and had led what was by all appearances a risk-free life. But he was overweight, and heart disease runs in our family.
I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.
His father is governor of Media, and though he has the greatest command given him of all the rest of my generals, he still covetously desires more, and my being without issue spurs him on to this wicked design. But Philotas takes wrong measures.
The first time I saw nitroglycerine was in the beginning of the Crimean War. Professor Zinin in St. Petersburg exhibited some to my father and me, and struck some on an anvil to show that only the part touched by the hammer exploded without spreading.
It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.
My mother was very strong. Once, she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father’s head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap.
I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like – when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn’t look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that’s terrorism, too.
I have my mother who is an Irish-Italian, and my father who is African, so I have the taste buds of an Italian and the spice of an African.
I love my heritage! I have my mother, who is an Irish-Italian, and my father who is African, so I have the taste buds of an Italian and the spice of an African.
I’m a father I’m a friend. I think I’ve got the biggest heart in the world. A lot of times, that’s not a good thing. It’s a gift and a curse.
The great thing that I appreciate – the fact that my godfather, William ‘Sticky’ Jackson, was a Tuskegee Airman because my father was first born in Ozark, Alabama. The sacrifices and the commitment of those men made it possible for myself and many others.
My family came to Newark in the ’20s. We’ve been there a long, long time. My father’s name was LeRoi, the French-ified aspect of it, because his first name was Coyette, you see. They come from South Carolina.
My mother came from a very affluent background, very Westernized, while my father was more Eastern. So I’ve had a very good blend of the East and the West. I guess this has been extremely helpful in making my career and the way I function.
My father is a poet. He’s a literary giant of this country – writes in Hindi – and also quite unique because he has a Ph.D. in English Literature. He taught at Harvard University, which is one of the most prominent universities in the country.
My mother left behind three daughters when she went to America and started a new life. I certainly felt abandoned when my father died of a brain tumour I felt he had abandoned me to this terrible, volatile mother and I had no protection.
I grew up with Bible stories, which are like fairy tales, because my father was a minister. We heard verses and prayers every day. I liked the gorier Bible stories. I did have a book of Chinese fairy tales. All the people except the elders looked like Italians. But we were not a family that had fiction books.
The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.
The father figure is something I love, but also suffocate from and want to work against.
My father was the center of the family, and everyone tried to please him.
In my father’s generation, the product was 80 percent of what you were putting into the world, and your personal life was 20 percent. It now seems that 80 percent of the product I put out is silly, made-up stories and what I’m wearing.
I really have been enjoying performing more lately than I have in a long time and you know, it’s all about that sort of centered feeling that I have now. You know, thanks to, not just my kid, but her father before her. You know, I have a kind of a grounding through them that I really relish, and I think is also good for my work, you know.
My father was a newspaper editor, so I was surrounded by journalists my entire life. I think the fact that he was so well known may be why I chose to go into magazines and move to the States at a young age.
Everyone knows the beautiful story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac. How this noble father led his child to the slaughter how Isaac meekly submitted how the farce went on till the lad was bound and laid on the altar, and how God then stopped the murder, and blessed the intending murderer for his willingness to commit the crime.
My father was grounded, a very meat-and-potatoes man. He was a baker.
My father wasn’t a cruel man. And I loved him. But he was a pretty tough character. His own father was even tougher – one of those Victorians, hard as iron – but my dad was tough enough.
Until he lost all his money, my father was a successful north London Jewish businessman. He was unusual among his immediate family in that he was enormously cultured and had an incredible library.
I don’t think my father was a bad man, all in all.
With every year that passes, I get further away from my target audience, and while I’ve been happy to think of myself as a father figure to these kids, I’d be a little distressed to be thought of as a grandfather figure.
As a father now, I wouldn’t do what my dad did, because it left me feeling emotionally unstable as a kid. But he didn’t do the things he did out of selfishness or malice.
My grandson Sam Saunders has been playing golf since he could hold a club and I spent a lot of time with him over the years. Like my father taught me, I showed him the fundamentals of the game and helped him make adjustments as he and his game matured over the years.
My parents had this relationship that was really terrifying. I mean, the level of hatred that they had, and the level of physical abuse – my mother would beat up my father, basically – and I think I was drawn to images on television that were bright and reflective.
I’ve just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I’m now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.
My mother is from Compton, California, but my father is from Hayneville, Alabama, and that’s less than 20 miles from Selma.
Once, when I tried to calculate the height of the balcony, I broke my arm. Another time, I wanted to see if water moves faster than kerosene. When my father came out to smoke, a fire broke out.
I remember for my 18th birthday, I was going to get a tattoo, and I made the mistake of thinking I was a man and telling my father, and he was like, ‘Oh yeah? You better tattoo a new address on your arm, because you’re not living here!’ And that was the end of that discussion.
I got into cars through my father. He used to work on cars. My job was to hold the light, which pretty much was the limit of my mechanical abilities.
Although my father is English, I was brought up in Australia.
I have to hold a meeting with the rising generation every evening, and that takes time. Henry can say, ‘Twinkle, twinkle,’ all himself, and Edward can repeat it after his father! Giants of genius! Paragons of erudition!
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, is right there… she’s in town because her father was at Johnson Smith College… and she was delivering a speech there.
I have my granddad’s record collection, which I treasure, and my father’s – Rolling Stones to Sidney Bechet.
It’s easy for me to say that now, now I’m a father, I’ve got a four-and-a-half year old boy, I’m a different person. Well, I’m still the same person, but I’m different.
I think of my films as not necessarily political but more moral. Between my father, my stepfather, and my mother – they all felt pretty passionately about the importance of standing up and doing the right thing, and none of them were suck-ups. What motivates me is usually abuse of power.
When my parents met, my mother was a waitress and my father was a dockyard worker. They were part of that post-war better-yourself generation, so they both went to night school.
My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.
When I was a child, I was always nicking my mum’s jewellery to wear, and I loved to drape a massive Chinese shawl around me from our fancy-dress box. I was obsessed with a feather and rabbit-fur collar from the age of three and attempted to make one with my friend, whose father was a gamekeeper.
My father used to always give me a basketball, a skate board, and a bike every Christmas. That’s all I wanted every year.
My father’s family hails from Banaras. My grandfather taught mathematics at Banaras Hindu University. Banaras is also dedicated to Lord Shiva, home to one of the great jyotirlings, the Kashi Vishwanath temple.
In the early ’90s, I was disillusioned after the blasts and riots in Mumbai. I was in college and started thinking that religion was the root cause of all these evils. While my father told me not to blame religion because of a few bad people, I wasn’t convinced. The faith was restored after I started writing my first book.
My father certainly believed that one could make a living outside of an office, as he did. And that if I didn’t want to work for other people, there wasn’t any reason why I had to. He conveyed that very strongly to my sister and I – that smart people can make their own livings.
My father would have been spectacularly ill-suited to working for an institution of any kind, and I suspect that, to a lesser degree, that’s true of me, too.
I once won a second prize in a history concert. My parents came to the ceremony. Somebody else had won the prize for best all-around student. Afterwards my father said to me, ‘Never, ever disgrace me like that again.’ When I tell my Western friends, they are aghast. But I adore my father. It didn’t knock my self-esteem at all.
My father knew classical music very well. Driving in the car, listening to the radio, he could name every composer, every movement, what piece it was. I was fascinated by the way he recognized who wrote what.
When I was 4 or 5, I attended my father’s concerts. He very often played Strauss waltzes as encores and I saw something happening with the audience.
When my twin grandchildren, Linda and Lyeke, were born two years ago, it changed me. I felt it was the essence of what life is about, and I cried all day. When my son Pierre, their father, was born I didn’t cry like that.
Dinner ‘conversation’ at the Cohens’ meant my sister, mom, and I relaying in brutal detail the day’s events in a state of amplified hysteria, while my father listened to his own smooth jazz station in his head.
My father has a great love of science, and he indoctrinated me into it early. I think I was 12 or so when we designed a moon base.
I had just been promoted to the first rugby team. It was a perfect, wonderful coming of age. My brother was already in the team, and my father had come to watch us. We went home, and my father died in front of me. Horribly, in about half an hour. He had a heart attack.
I think the obvious answer is I was raised in New York City, so growing up, not only myself but my family, like my father, we would watch a lot of Scorsese films.
I was born in a poor family, a lower middle class family. My father was a clerk in the forest department. I was very bad at studies. I was not very good at sports, also.
I spent my entire childhood living abroad because of my father’s occupation, so we were on long-haul flights all the time.
With a diplomat father, for whom foreign postings were a fact of life, my siblings and I were expected to attend boarding schools in Britain.
I had grown up in a privileged, upper-caste Hindu community and because my father worked for a Catholic hospital, we lived in a prosperous Christian neighborhood.
One of the things about being a boy, especially growing up without a father, is you really don’t have that role model to teach you how to do things.
What I’m not saying is that all government spending is bad. It’s not – far, far from it, but there is no free lunch, as a former colleague of mine used to say. There is no public tooth fairy. Father Christmas does not work on the Treasury staff this year. You can never bail someone out of trouble without putting someone else into trouble.
My father was a really good athlete, so his pop-ups really were sky high. Eventually I learned how to judge them properly and catch them well. It was great training for when I started to play on teams, which I did all through school.
I want to go to Lapland and see Father Christmas, and now I’ve got a child, so I’ve got an excuse. Also, I’d like to go to South America especially as I’m now living in that part of the world, in L.A. now. And I must get down to Mexico.
From early on there were two things that filled my life – music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father. He was a jazz pianist and also a very good storyteller, an avid reader. He passed both those interests on to me.
Master Harold’ is about me as a little boy, and my father, who was an alcoholic. There’s a thread running down the Fugard line of alcoholism. Thankfully I haven’t passed it on to my child, a wonderful daughter who’s stone-cold sober. But I had the tendency from my father, just as he had had it from his father.
When my first daughter was born, my husband held her in his hands and said, ‘My God, she’s so beautiful.’ I unwrapped the baby from her blankets. She was average size, with long thin fingers and a random assortment of toes. Her eyes were close set, and she had her father’s hooked nose. It looked better on him.
I was born in Israel, to Canadian parents. My father immigrated in 1948, part of a wave of young men and women who came as pioneers, to fight for a Jewish homeland. Their motive was in large part a reaction to the Holocaust, and their slogan was ‘Never Again.’
Before I was married, I didn’t consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn’t do ‘do-it-yourself.’ When my father needed to hammer something he generally used his shoe, and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers.
My father could be very strict, but very fair. His father was the same. We all respected my grandfather he was the head of the clan. Every morning, we all had to say good morning and kiss his hand. But not me. I jumped on his lap and bit him.
I was born in the Bronx, and then my father moved us to the country at an early age.
Growing up as a kid my father was British and a soccer player. His idol was a guy that passed the ball a lot, Stanley Matthews. Our family thought if you could be unselfish your teammates would always like you.
In Argentina, you do what your father does. If your father plays football, you play football. If your father plays polo, you play polo.
My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike. She said little, especially when my father or the men who worked for him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy for the miners.
Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.
My father always said, ‘If you love what you do, you won’t mind slogging through it for several hours a day.’
Basically, a manager is a father figure to 20 or 25 blokes. It’s about trying to get the best out of them and creating team spirit.
My father was a waiter basically, and when I got my first professional job as an actor, I left a job that he found me for half the amount of money. So anyone would think that they’re stupid, that that would be a stupid move.
My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They’ve ended up in Scotland, where my father – well, both of them – will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.
My advice to Robin is listen to your heart, do what you feel. Follow your heart in love and marriage as you would in careers, and you’ll be fine. Robin has a great heart. He’s a fabulous father.
I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given, is our society. Your education, and your mother and father, they tell you this is how it is, but then you hit adolescence and you think, ‘Is it? Why? Why is it like that?’ Sometimes that questioning leads to something more.
But mostly, it’s a book about my relationship with my father.
My mother is, my father certainly was. They were kind of the local intelligentsia in the town where I grew up.
My mother had a master’s degree and had been a schoolteacher before she started having kids at 30. But my father’s family were landowners, farmer-merchants. Moneymaking was extremely important, like one of those semi-rapacious families in Lillian Hellman, where they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
The luckiest person in the world is somebody who is born into a small, shabby-genteel town on a major railway connection with 24,000 souls and a bird sanctuary and whose grandfather owns a farm and whose father owns a business -whose family is mildly prosperous but not rich, which means you can leave the town.
My father comes from a generation of film that actors my age don’t even know about, which is really sad.
Across the board, from my mother to my father to my aunts and uncles, everybody has always given me a lot of love.
My mother’s father was Jewish, so she was very conservative. She liked little, pretty music-orchestral-type things.
My father was a chef but hadn’t owned his own business. I didn’t like that. In my heart of hearts, I knew I wanted to be in business.
My grandfather was a very elegant individual. My father also. He was a lawyer and farmer in Cuba. In Miami, he had to go to work wherever he could. But whenever it was time to go out, you saw how they cared for how they looked.
My father used to say, ‘Well, Ann, maybe the best thing you’ll ever do, you haven’t even thought of yet.’
I think eventually I want to become a teacher, like my father wanted to be, and hopefully positively influence the next generation.
My father wanted a boy. I was supposed to be called Albert. That was probably the beginning of why things got so complicated, because I wasn’t a boy.
I was raised with a sense of entrepreneurship – my father owned a roofing business, and I grew up with the idea that you never want someone telling you what you can and cannot do.
My mother wanted to be a teacher when she was young, and my father didn’t approve of it, so she fought very hard to become one. And she did it. So when I said I wanted to become an actress, my mother was very supportive. She always said to me, ‘There’s no such thing as ‘can’t.’
When I was younger I was fat. I was never conscious of it and was content with who I was because I was so loved. My mother never told me to lose weight and my father doted on me, but my agent told me. I tried, but I loved Indian food too much.
I grew up in an environment with virtually no Hispanics where you see only people in your culture in custodial jobs. I had a messed up image of what we bring to this nation. My father was known as a pioneering figure in Cuban music, but I still associated him with everything that was negative in my neighborhood. I could not have been more mistaken.
That is the thankless position of the father in the family – the provider for all, and the enemy of all.
When Obama was first proposed as a presidential candidate in 2007, the nation failed to have a meaningful debate concerning the serious constitutional issue of electing someone whose father was not a U.S. citizen.
My father was trained as a saddler, but in fact as a young man worked in his father’s business of rearing and selling cattle, so he grew up in the countryside.
I’m actually half Brit and half American. I have a British father and an American mother, but as far as I’m aware, no Middle Eastern blood.
I am half Scottish. My father is an expat from Glasgow, and on my mother’s side there’s a bit of French, a bit of Scottish, a bit of Irish.
The reason why I found acting is because my father passed away. He passed away really young. I was going to go to med school. My father’s dream was that all of his kids become doctors. I realized in school I didn’t like it. When he died, it was like a wake-up call. Life is too short to do something you don’t want to do.
I owed it to my father that I was elected to Parliament in the first place, but I owed it to my mother that I stuck it out once I got there.
My father would often work all night and sleep during the day, so for us, dinner might be pancakes, and breakfast might be beef stroganoff.
I think what my father appreciated was the science experiment of life. He had these kids, and they had their own experiences. He wanted us to discover the world for ourselves.
Thirteen, 13 children, and I love – I love them all. And I think I’ve been a good father to all of them.
I lost my father was I 10 years old, and I always looked for a father. I missed my father very much.
Somewhere, sometime I’d stopped expecting my father to father.
One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I’ve had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I’ve brought readers to my dad’s work. I can’t tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father’s work was masterful.
Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere.
My wife is the most wonderful woman in the world, and my parents are the most extraordinary father and mother.
I have an uncle who lived to 101, and my father died at 95, so I have a second career ahead of me.
Al Gore’s problem, in my view, is that he never liked politics. He’s actually deeply uncomfortable in it but felt he had to do it because of his father. He’s much more comfortable in a private sector role and has, in fact, been much more successful in a private sector role, and I admire him for that.
Just recently I was in Target with my mom shopping, and out of the blue, I see this father and his two daughters and he says, ‘Can they get a picture with you?’ And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Am I the one millionth customer or something?’
I am a person whose father had no religion but who went to the nuns for a couple of years. And I think I’m the same: On one hand, I pray on the other hand, I don’t believe. I am constantly between the two.
Some people had fathers who were bankers or farmers, my father made films, that’s how I saw it. As for the movie stars, they were just around, some of them were friends, others weren’t, it was all just a part of my everyday life.
My parents had four children quickly, divorced quickly – when I was two – and my mother remarried quickly. We were suddenly in a different environment with a different father.
I spent two months in Fredericksburg, Texas, when I was 8, while my father shot a movie, and I loved it. I just embraced the whole cowboy culture. I got myself a pair of awesome boots and a cowboy hat.
To every little girl, her father is a hero. My father actually is one.
It’s taken some getting used to, that my father actually is a hero.
In 2004, I joined my father, John Kerry, on the trail in his bid for the United States presidency.
I told my mother at about the seventh year of therapy that I had been abused sexually by my father, and she hung up the phone on me.
He never admitted anything, even on his deathbed. He was a deluded liar. If it weren’t for my father, I don’t think I would be so open. So that’s a huge blessing.
I was taught by my father. He was head of the primary school so I went to his school until I was 11 – I was the youngest of four daughters and we had all been taught by him. But I didn’t really enjoy my secondary education that much, probably because I am a very physical person and don’t enjoy sitting at a desk all day.
I don’t think I’ve ever come to terms with not having had a father around, and that’s why I made so many mistakes with men.
I remember when my father passed away, we drove the funeral procession past the bank so he could say one last goodbye. That’s how much the bank meant to my father.
This baby comes out of you and there’s no handbook. They hand you this child and say, ‘Don’t kill it. Feed it, clothe it and shelter it.’ I never knew what that kind of love was. I remember looking at my daughter for the first time and wondering if that’s the way my father looked at me.
I remember looking at my daughter for the first time and wondering if that’s the way my father looked at me. I could cry, because she’s everything to me. I feel so blessed to be taught so much by her.
Seven years ago, my father and I realized that our relationship was extremely unique, especially in the African-American community. He raised me to not only understand the fundamentals of basketball and to try to be a player with a high basketball IQ, but he wanted me to understand that my image and my name meant more than stats.
When I was 12 and met my real father for the first time, I was terrified I would lose the one I already had.
The food we ate was Indian, and both my mother and father were very deep into the ancient philosophy of India, so it could well have been an Indian household.
My father, Simon Hoggart, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June 2010. By this point, it had spread to his spleen and metastasised in his lungs and so was pronounced terminal.
My mother was largely a housewife until she and my father were divorced. No one in the family read for pleasure – it was a very unintellectual household – but my mother did read to us when we were little, and that’s how I started to read.
I read a lot, very passionately, from the time I was very young, but it was a constant battle my mother would more or less let me be, but with my father, I was always searching for a place where he wouldn’t find me. Whenever he saw me reading, he would tell me to put the book down and go outside, act like a normal person.
I was a total music nerd. I grew up on Perry Street in the ’80s. My father wrote books about jazz, so I was always at the ‘Village Vanguard.’
When I was a kid, I used to pretend to be Bond I used to make up scenarios and irritate my sister and annoy my mother and father pretending to be someone else, so I kind of was already acting when I was a child. I just didn’t really know it.
I came from a very, very small valley in the middle of South Wales. I grew up there with my father, who’s a coal miner, and my mother worked in a normal factory.
I used to just daydream all the time about being in movies, from the age of, like, four onwards. I would sit down and watch movies with my father and my grandfather, and always pretended that I was in the stories.
When I turned fifteen, I remember my father gave me a credit card which I was allowed to use for two things: emergencies and books.
My father was from Northern Ireland, and coming from somewhere like that, your faith defines you. That’s something we don’t really understand outside Northern Ireland, but because of my parents and grandparents, I’ve experienced it.
I have always found it difficult to wait for things – whether it was to see my father or sailor brother, Alan, again after their long sea trips, or the chance of a better job, or even new curtains.
My father was a classical singer of baroque music, and my older sister was in musical theatre, and I thought about doing the same thing but then realised straight acting was for me.
I don’t think I’ll be playing again. I’m very content and happy, doing the types of things I haven’t gotten to do, be a father.
My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who’ve become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master’s thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn’t find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn’t read Faulkner.
I have been connected with the Niels Bohr Institute since the completion of my university studies, first as a research fellow and, from 1956, as a professor of physics at the University of Copenhagen. After the death of my father in 1962, I followed him as director of the Institute until 1970.
My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug ‘Vanity Fair.’ You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.
My father was a factory worker, and we were really poor. But everything I earned peddling papers and working in stores, he made me put aside for education.
My father was a very special human being. He was brilliant in academics, sports and the arts. He wrote, performed and directed plays in English and Hindi/Urdu at his regiment.
My mother enjoyed acting as well with my father, who used to direct her in plays at his regiment. My sister is an excellent singer. However, it was only me who decided to pursue acting as a career.
Losing my father at a tender age was hard, and I felt it more so while growing up when I needed a father to talk to. Especially while pursuing an acting career where I would have loved his guidance and advice, since it was his passion as well.
My father made false teeth. Unfortunately, during the Depression, not many people could afford them, and my parents lost their home.
A little secret – I’m the child of a shrink. I am my mom’s a shrink, and my father’s a lawyer. So believe me, I analyze and negotiate. That is a huge amount of the director’s work, especially when you’re working with people who – such a variety.
My father is my father, and I am me. I have the advantage of this honest comparison, quiet, and the opportunity to share in his profession.
You must understand, that for a daughter to protect her father’s image is natural Freud built a whole career around it.
My father was a no-nonsense, dedicated, and focused minister, and there was usually a sermon he needed to prepare for or a Scripture he needed to study, and that always came first.
I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.
When I was seven, I had to stay home for several weeks because of some ailment, whereupon my father elected to teach me so that I should not fall behind. In fact, he taught me in three months as much as the school taught in two years, so, on returning to school, I was shifted from grade 4 to grade 6.
The course that will restore to the workmen a father’s duties and responsibilities, between which and themselves the state has now stepped, is for them to reject all forced contributions from others, and to do their own work through their own voluntary combinations.
My father was an Episcopal minister, and for 14 years my family lived in China, in a city called Wuchang. We four children spoke Chinese before we spoke English. We left when the communists came, in the early 1930s. I was about 5 years old.
I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books to be frivolous time-wasters, delighted in putting her favorite volumes into her grandchildren’s hands.
My father was the youngest of six brothers, and he was the brains. I never thought he was making what he should have. He had to split it with five brothers. So I made up my mind: I was going to go on my own and make my own money.
He learned through the way that my father and I felt about his songs, his country songs, that they were great songs. And then he went out and sang them for the audiences that we found, and he found a tremendous reaction to that.
My father was placid and easygoing. He owned a small shoe store where I helped out on Saturdays. I think he’d have been pleased if I’d made a career of working in the shoe store. But my mother was ambitious. She encouraged us to read books, and she pushed us toward a musical education.
I worked a long time to get good at what I’m doing, and nobody handed me a recording contract because of who my father is.
From the time I was in first grade or so, my dad collected ‘Star Wars’ toy figures from the 1970s and ’80s, and we’d take weekend family trips to antique shops and to toy stores. My father collected a crazy amount of ‘Star Wars’ stuff over the years, and he and I traveled to many conventions.
As someone who has seen war first hand, and as a father of three young adults, it was my hope that we could have resolved this conflict and disarmed Saddam Hussein without war. However, this was not the case.
When my sister and I came along, my father’s political life was completely over. He ran for president the year I was born. So that was the end of it. He had been congressman first, then governor, before all that. So when we came along, he was running the Dayton newspaper.
I grew up in central Florida in the nineteen-sixties, barefoot half the time and running around the orange groves where my father worked. I remember flocks of white birds that would lift from the backs of cattle, disturbed by the jackhammers and bulldozers clearing land for Walt Disney World.
I come from an interracial family: My father is from Nigeria, and so he is African-American, and my mother is American and white, so I rarely see skin color. It’s never an issue for me.
I grew up in East Germany, and we were short on technology. So my father was really proud to be the owner of a turntable.
Dark Side of the Moon’ was one of my father’s favorite records, which I obviously didn’t understand when I was young. To be honest, I don’t really have too many memories of hearing it, but I definitely have memories of the cover.
My father never liked me or my sister, and he never liked our mother either, after an initial infatuation, and in fact, he never liked anyone at all after an hour or two, no, no one except a stooge.
My father was a progressive farmer, and was always ready to lay aside an old plough if he could replace it with one better constructed for its work. All through life, I have ever been ready to buy a better plough.
I don’t care what you do – baseball or politics – George W. Bush is always going to be compared to his father. I just want it to be an easy answer in 50 years – Who was the better player, me, or my kids? I want it to be my kids.
Sadness… reflecting on the proud legacy of trust and fair play on which Reliance Industries was founded by my visionary father Dhirubhai Ambani, and how far RIL appeared to have moved away from those original values.
I saw my father deal with every headache the government threw his way – whether it had to do with the signs on the front of the building or the prices on the showroom floor. He knew he could do better, if government would just get out of the way – and stay out of the way. He was right.
My father was an Episcopalian minister, and I’ve always been comforted by the power of prayer.
My father is an acupuncturist, and the way he practices is very free. For me, he’s like an artist. He started to do acupuncture when it wasn’t so accepted. His spirit and outlook inspire me.
My father used to get me to read the newspaper to him, as if I was a radio. I would stand there and read the ‘Times.’
When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.
Just like my father, I’ve always loved education. In school I was a member of the honor society.
I must have got my detailed, obsessive streak from my father, who was an English teacher, because my mother wasn’t like me at all.
When I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, the neighborhood girls would sit on the stoop and sing. I was known as the kid who had a good voice and no father.
I think some of the pressure comes from the expectations of other people. Like if your father played baseball, they expect you to be the big lifesaver or something when you play a sport.
Happiness does not come from football awards. It’s terrible to correlate happiness with football. Happiness comes from a good job, being able to feed your wife and kids. I don’t dream football, I dream the American dream – two cars in a garage, be a happy father.
One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man.
When I seemed to be irritable or sad, my father would quote the learned Dr. Knight, and then say, ‘Just go to sleep.’ Like all smart aleck kids, I thought the advice was silly. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized just how smart Knight was.
My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was put to the grammar-school at eight years of age, my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church.
I never knew my father. He’d disappeared from the scene before I was born, and I still have no idea who he is. Perhaps strangely, it’s never bothered me I certainly don’t believe it’s really affected me.
The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
I was an only child and I had a mother and father who were just – there wasn’t a straight man in the house, and I mean that in a very nice way. They were fun, and we would laugh a lot.
A new father quickly learns that his child invariably comes to the bathroom at precisely the times when he’s in there, as if he needed company. The only way for this father to be certain of bathroom privacy is to shave at the gas station.
If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right.
What kept me out of trouble is going right to the edge and then… thinking that my mother would be embarrassed, and that I didn’t want to embarrass her, and that my father would be embarrassed, and I just didn’t want to do that to my family.
As a father and an ex-wrestler, it’s a dream come true. To be able to come back and be included in ‘WWE 2K17,’ it’s a huge honor.
My parents were children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it scarred them. Especially my father, who saw destitution in his Brooklyn, New York neighborhood adults standing in so called ‘bread lines,’ children begging in the streets.
Every time I am tempted to buy some dopey thing, I hear my late father’s voice: ‘Do you really need that?’ He was big on saving money and buying as much security as possible. He also encouraged charitable giving. So, I am responsible with currency.
My father firmly embraced the Ralph Kramden philosophy: he was king of his Levittown castle. He worked hard, and his family deferred to his wishes. Except me. I did not defer and was disciplined accordingly.
My father was a very good Boy Scout. He was very skilled with knots, and he showed me how to tie a bow tie.
Americans who have parents raised during the Great Depression or World War II understand how drastically things have changed on the home front. My father did not care a whit whether I liked him, and it would have been unthinkable for him to pick up my stuff. There were rules in the house, and they were enforced.
My father was a guitar player, and I was raised with a super high standard of what good guitar playing was.
I never stopped believing in us, and I never felt like I was wanting for anything, except for my father, and that was not going to be.
My father had a dairy farm. He employed three black families and one white family, and I used to play with black children.
Family doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to have a mother, a father, a little brother, and an older sister.
And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.
My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.
My father used to tape ‘Top of the Pops’ for me every Sunday, and I would sit in my bedroom, write down the lyrics of all of my favourite songs, and sing along. I was always singing in my bedroom with a hairbrush.
I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.
The only person who ever called me Paul was my father, so I always associate it with doing something wrong, you know. So, you know, occasionally, people will come up to me on the street and try to, you know, ingratiate themselves and call me Paul. I don’t like it, actually.
Oh, my wife is a wonderful cook. She comes from a food-loving Italian family – her father owned a pizzeria!
With the help of a friend I got father into a wagon, when the crowd had gone. I held his head in my lap during the ride home. I believed he was mortally wounded. He had been stabbed down through the kidneys, leaving an ugly wound.
My father’s an early aviator, and my first flight was with him at age two. Now, despite the fact that I got sick on the flight, I still enjoyed it, I believe.
My father came from a very poor background, but I was very fortunate in the sense that we were never in need. My dad was determined to make sure that we didn’t want for things. He wanted to give us more opportunity than he had, a better shot at a better life.
My kids are just waiting for me at home. I’m their father. They’re wondering, ‘When’s Daddy coming home?’
With sons and fathers, there’s an inexplicable connection and imprint that your father leaves on you.
In the early years, I found a voice that was my voice and also partly my father’s voice. But isn’t that what you always do? Why do kids at 5 years old go into the closet and put their daddy’s shoes on? Hey, my kids do it.
I want to be able to experience everything. I want to experience being a husband, experience being a father, experience, maybe, hopefully, someday being a grandfather, and all those things. I want that experience. When I die, I want to be exhausted.
I believe honor thy mother and father is not just a good commandment to live by, it is good public policy to govern by. That is why I feel so strongly about Medicare.
My mother Molly had a nervous breakdown after my father Chic died, aged 50. He was a very generous man who ran a shop in Dundee giving a lot of people tick. When he died, a lot of people hadn’t paid their bills, so he died with a lot of debt. After he died, my mother went doolally.
My father made sure that I had lots of levels of education – from ballroom-dancing to painting, commando training, theatre and magic.
Dylan, myself and my father were in a two hour movie called The Sand Kings, which started off the Outer Limits series. It was sort of the two hour pilot movie.
My father is Cuban. Spanish was my first language, but I don’t speak it that much anymore because I had dyslexia, and in school they work with you only in English. But I’m proud to be Latina, and most people don’t know I am.
My father has positional vertigo, and if he flies he gets really dizzy, so he has to drive out to California, which he does a couple times a year. We talk, but we e-mail mostly.
I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he… he failed, basically.
My father instilled in me an attitude that you couldn’t really enjoy yourself unless you had done something to deserve it. So, my childhood was spent working on farms or local shops or, when I got older, in banks.
If you’re going to be a father and whatnot, yeah, you better be responsible about it as best you can.
If my father Ninoy Aquino were alive today, he would say that he is not superman or superboy. In effect, heroes are really just ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times and respond properly.
When my father returned home on the twenty-first of August 1983, he had a speech prepared. Filipinos never got to hear it, because he was murdered right on the tarmac.
When my father was assassinated, I decided that I would not compete with his memory, but the priority would be to achieve his dream.
I’m from a middle class family, but my father squandered all the money, so I didn’t really run around with rich people.
Fortunately for me, I had a father who didn’t let us get away with anything. You were taught respect, and you were taught to be humble. That has a lot to do with how I am now, because I’m still scared of my dad.
I’ve heard my father say that the man is to be the priest, the provider, and the protector of his family. He’s the priest because he is the spiritual leader, monitoring and growing the spiritual temperature of his family.
In the same way that I cannot be perfect and need grace for my mistakes, I also need to give my kids grace. I am constantly learning to be patient with them, understanding that they won’t do everything right all the time, while still holding them to a high standard, as their heavenly father does.
My grandmother and my father always said I would end up as a missionary. Well, I feel like I am one now.
What does God the Father look like? Although I’ve never seen Him, I believe – as with the Holy Spirit – He looks like Jesus looked on earth.
I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father.
I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.
I’m very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don’t really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It’s about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.
I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer’s office above the coffee shop where we’d been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, ‘By the time you get this, Daddy, I’ll already be Mrs. Blaise!’
I don’t feel the depression the people who are always looking back to the ’50s, to ‘Father Knows Best’ feel. I can see the coming of another glorious era.
I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer.
She encouraged any artistic impulse I had, and my father discouraged any artistic impulse I had. They took out their problems with each other on me and my sister.
In Country’ is about a high school girl’s quest for knowledge about her father, who died in Vietnam just before she was born.
It was a mistake. I was wrong, but I discovered this many years later. I was acting on the basis of this mandate given me by the most important leaders of the world: President Bush’s father, prime minister of France, President Mitterand, the Chinese, everybody.
My mother and father were fantastic, very active. I find it difficult to say this, but I’m quite a loving person and I’ve always been loving to my friends. In the long run, that pays off. I’m very interested in other people, and if you are, they’re interested in you.
My mother’s a singer and my mother’s father is a singer, and everyone on both sides are all country-western bluegrass musicians.
Everyone I know who is successful has issues with their father, regardless of whether it was sports or business or entertainment.
My goal was to play drums, but my father made me take piano lessons. He told me I needed to learn to read music first, so I took lessons for six years. I thank God that he made me take those lessons, because it taught me a tremendous amount.
I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertaker’s assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
My father was a coal hewer from Goldthorpe, a coal-mining village in South Yorkshire. He played for the Yorkshire second team as an opening fast bowler – to me he was a gorgeously heroic man. He helped form a union and closed down the Barnsley seam because it was seeping gas, and saved many, many lives.
My father always read obituaries to me out loud, not because he was maudlin or morbid, but because they were mini biographies.
When Mike Tyson was only 18, his managers used to market him on posters, reminding you that if your grandfather had missed Joe Louis, or your father Muhammad Ali, don’t you miss Tyson.
Think of your pension and start saving. Like my father, I have been a spendthrift, and I regret that.
I haven’t done a lot of things in my career that my kids can watch, because they are 8, 6 and 3, and they are pretty young so given the concepts that the film was about a superhero, it was a black superhero, and it was a father and son type partnership.
My father’s death, my move, and my frightening and difficult delivery created a tremendous amount of stress, pain, and sadness for me. I was practically devastated beyond recovery.
All kids love to get dirty, but if I wandered into the garage, my father would say: ‘Son, you’re not going to have filthy hands like mine. You’re going into show business.’
My father earned every penny he had, and I would have loved to have bought him a Rolls-Royce because his whole life was cars. Sadly, he didn’t live to see the day when I could have done that for him, which still hurts.
My father kept me busy from dawn to dusk when I was a kid. When I wasn’t pitching hay, hauling corn or running a tractor, I was heaving a baseball into his mitt behind the barn… If all the parents in the country followed his rule, juvenile delinquency would be cut in half in a year’s time.
If I was producing something, it wouldn’t make sense to me to cast somebody because of who their father is because that doesn’t put anyone in the seats in the theatre. I wouldn’t go to a movie because that person’s father is so and so.
I feel more and more like ‘myself’ these days. Before becoming a father, I can remember a low-level feeling of somehow not quite being myself.
I never talked about architecture with my father, which I regret.
Kim Jong Un came in as a fresh face, so I think there’s a great disappointment that he’s playing the same game as his father.
By our Heavenly Father and only because of God, only because of God. We’re like other couples. We do not get along perfectly we do not go without arguments and, as I call them, fights, and heartache and pain and hurting each other. But a marriage is three of us.
When I received the news of the Nobel Peace Award, I could not believe it. I told my father, ‘I think they have the wrong name, Dad. Please, can you talk to this man on the phone? I’m busy cooking!’
Prior to that, I had associated this music with older people, like my father.
While this has been a private part of my family’s life, it is now clear a media story will soon emerge. My father tragically ended his life while battling terminal cancer in 1979.
God wants to father all of us until we’re dead sure of his approval, his guiding power and his promise of heaven.
I grew up in a very musical family, my father was a musician and a big band leader and made records.
Mobile is a seaport town, and we ate a lot of seafood. We’d go fishing, we’d catch our fish and we’d eat our fish. It was a ritual on Saturday morning for all my family – my grandfather, my brothers, my uncles, my father – to go fishing, and then the ladies of the family would clean the fish and fry them up.
We are a mixed up people. We have mixed up ways of naming, too… When my father’s brothers and sisters first went to colonial schools, they had to produce a surname. They also had to show they were good Christians by adopting a western name. They adopted my grandfather’s name as surname. Wainaina.
I think that it’s important if you run for President that you have to make those important decisions. And your father, if he can help, probably, he helps just by being your father without getting intimately involved.
My father was a very disciplined singer who worked hard at his craft, and I was around that growing up.
My father was a ham radio geek, and I remember the glow of the vacuum tubes from a Hammarlund receiver that became a hand-me-down to me.
You don’t have to be Wilt Chamberlain to get into the Basketball Hall of Fame. If you don’t have a sweet turnaround jumper from 18 feet, the best route to the Hall is fatherhood. Daniel Biasone, aka the ‘father of the 24-second clock,’ made the cut.
The first outbreak of America’s 11-year skyjacking epidemic occurred in the summer of 1961, when four planes were seized in the nation’s airspace. The last of these incidents, involving 16-year-old Cody Bearden and his father, Leon, is the one that finally forced the federal government to pay attention to the escalating crisis.
Superman’s original name was Kal-El, or Swift God. His father’s name was Jor-El. Superman was clearly drawn as a modern-day god.
As its citizens humbly recommit to an acceptance of guidance from the God of our fathers, our nation will once again see the miraculous resurrection of the proud, responsible, visionary black father. And with him, his family and community will be lifted.
So as I was growing up, my father was always in the middle of making a film or preparing a film. It was a full-time, all-consuming type of operation.
While my father sang, Pedroza stared at me. By that time my eye pupils were staring at him, too, like a terrier that’s got hold of a fox.
My father established the first women’s university in the kingdom, abolished slavery, and tried to establish a constitutional monarchy that separates the position of king from that of prime minister.
My father’s Jewish, so my world is Jewish whenever I go home.
I’m very fond of an old map of London that used to belong to my father. I’m a big London fan, and the evolution of the city is astonishing, when you look back to Pepys and how small it was – everyone knew each other.
When I was a child, I saw my father diving to the deepest point in the ocean with the U.S. Navy.
My father was a golden boy from a very small town. He won a very prestigious law scholarship to NYU Law School, and there in Greenwich Village, he met my mother, who was very young, fresh off the boat from Germany.
When I was 14, my mother died. My father, who had always had ulcers, came apart. He had a series of intestinal operations, and was in the hospital for nearly a year. So the four of us teenagers lived by ourselves in the apartment without a guardian.
My grandfather had been on the New York City force with his 11 brothers around the turn of the century. He was killed in the line of duty. My father, who was 16, was the oldest son, so he had to quit school and go to work to support his mother.
I think the Mother is gradually revealing itself to me and taking over. But it is not the Mother alone. It is the Mother and the Father, the male and the female, sort of gradually having their marriage.
You must be ready to give up everything, not only material attachments but also human attachments – father, mother, wife, children – everything that you have. But the one thing which you have to abandon unconditionally is your self.
We’ve done as best a job as we can making it clear that I’m earning what I’m earning because of me and not because of who my father is. But at the same time, I’m not ignoring things that would be dumb to ignore, like people that I can know through him and experiences I can have through him and things that I can learn from him.
I grew up in Manchester, and we were very poor. My father was a miner who joined the Navy during the war and developed a lung disease and had to have a lung removed.
My father was an entrepreneur – a sign maker, and he had about 20 employees – and often he’d take me to business meetings, and I would listen to him talk with his workers and customers. We would also talk a lot about business over dinner.
I remember going to London with my father in 1968 to see ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ I just soaked in that movie. To me, that was real it was going to happen.
My mother and father instilled in me a sense of purpose not defined by today’s street obsession with bling, cars or cribs.
If, like Harry Keogh, I could talk to the dead – God, there are an awful lot of people I would like to speak to! Not least my father. Being in the army for 22 years, I didn’t see enough of him, and I know there are a great many things I could have learned from him.
If you go from a structure where you have the support and that partner and that construction of a family and that’s broken apart, I think that’s probably a lot harder than always being a single mom and having the father being a support in another area.
My father was always telling himself no one was perfect, not even my mother.
My father was in the ad business, and he wanted to be a painter.
And so I put down some of the things that he said, about keeping your tools sharpened and not letting them lie on the ground where they get hurt or get abused and dirty and can’t find them. And some thoughts about how his father used to do things.
My mother’s father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay’s ‘Lays of Ancient Rome.’ While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I’d be Horatius keeping the bridge.
I was the adoring son of a Welsh-Irish father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a Catholic Knight of Columbus who was a blue-collar, trade union organizer and, not surprisingly, a fervid Nixon-hater.
I attribute my entire football career, as far as getting me started, getting me interested, keeping me that way was my father. He went to every game even though he was crippled and wasn’t real healthy.
My father taught me Basic and rudimentary C, I learned everything else on my own, including studying computational complexity on my own. That’s more a function of my age than anything else though – back when I was in school there were hardly any programming classes.
My father was a classic intellectual. From him I learned devotion, and I also learned about the life of the mind.
Harvey and I grew up in Queens, N.Y. My brother and I shared a room for 18 years until we went away to college. When we were kids, after our father said, ‘Lights out,’ he also exclaimed, ‘No more talking. Time for sleep.’ But we’d stay up late, arguing over statistics, who the best center fielder was – Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle.
When I was a child, my father taught me to put up my fists like a boy and to be prepared to defend myself at all times.
My father was very chic. My mum was always encouraging me. Some parents would say, ‘Why don’t you be a lawyer, a doctor, or something more important?’ They never said that.
No, my father passed away when I was 13 years old. I was very young.
My mother born in Mexico, but was Lebanese in origin. She born 1902 the same year my father arrived to Mexico when he was 14 years old.
I was born on October 21, 1956 in Burbank, California. My father, Eddie Fisher, was a famous singer. My mother, Debbie Reynolds, was a movie star. Her best-known role was in ‘Singin’ In The Rain.’
He’s a very strange guy, my father. I can’t get mad at him because he’s so adorable.
My father was a joyous, joyous spirit, he really was. He was a hedonist, that was just – he enjoyed life, thrust up to the elbows with it. He was a terrible father. I don’t know that he was parented that well.
For any child, boy or girl, a father is both Jedi and Sith: Obi-Wan Kenobi – gentle and calming and good – and Vader, fierce and terrifying.
My father died when I was young, and after he did, my mother had it tough. Very tough.
If there’s no relationship with a father who’s absent, nobody talks about it.
I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father’s religion, if they can find out what it is.
Sometimes I wake up before dawn, and I love sitting up in the middle of the bed with all the lights off, pitch-black dark, and talking to the Father, with no interruptions and nothing that reminds me that there’s anything in life but me and Him.
I bought all the books, but I probably knew on the first day that law school wasn’t for me. I didn’t give up until about ten days. I don’t think I really told my father. I really didn’t like my father knowing my things were not successful.
The Bible tells us that God will meet all our needs. He feeds the birds of the air and clothes the grass with the splendor of lilies. How much more, then, will He care for us, who are made in His image? Our only concern is to obey the heavenly Father and leave the consequences to Him.
If I’d seen a grown man beating a crippled boy, of course I’d intervene. If my father died and left my mother destitute, it’s your instinct to take care of her. So when I started to think about it in those terms, it started to make sense to me.
I remember hearing stories from my mother and father about their parents and grandparents when they were taken off the reservation, taken to the boarding schools, and pretty much taught to be ashamed of who they were as Native Americans. You can feel that impact today.
My mother is very good in Scrabble. In Boggle, my father is probably better.
My parents always asked me what I thought, listened to my opinions, articulated their diagnoses of our challenges at home and abroad, and shared their ideas for how to build a more equal and prosperous country. I always felt part of their call to serve and part of my father’s journey.
When my father announced his campaign for president on Oct. 3, 1991, I had already cast my vote in favor of his candidacy.
Even during my father’s 1984 gubernatorial campaign, it was, ‘Do you want to grow up and be governor one day?’ ‘No. I am four.’
My parents were definitely on the incentive side of parenting. Like, they told me that my father had learned to read when he was three. So, of course, I thought I had to, too.
My father volunteered in early 1941, before Pearl Harbor, and became an officer in the U.S. Navy. As I was growing up, he taught me the responsibility of command: A leader is ultimately responsible for every aspect of the welfare of people under his or her care. That was a deeply felt obligation in his generation.
Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Father of the Republic, made it his great aim in his revolutionary leadership to secure freedom and equality of status for China among the nations of the world.
I have my father’s lopsided mouth. When I smile, my lips slope to one side. My doctor sister calls it my cerebral palsy mouth. I am very much a daddy’s girl, and even though I would rather my smile wasn’t crooked, there is something moving for me about having a mouth exactly like my father’s.
My father was an airline pilot, so we travelled more spontaneously than a lot of families. On a Thursday, we could decide to go somewhere like Barbados the next day for a long weekend.
My father was one of the greatest professional bowlers of all time. Seriously. Billy Hardwick: PBA Hall of Fame, Player of the Year in ’63 and ’69, and the first winner of the triple crown of bowling, among other things.
My father and I are very similar and have a wonderful relationship, but we both stand by our opinions.
The first audition I went out on was because my father was on an audition for a TV show called the ‘Gilmore Girls,’ and that kind of snowballed a lot of stuff in my life.
I grew up in a house where my father went on auditions, and he got some and he lost some, and there were good years and lean years. I didn’t expect anything from the business, and that’s often a danger in Hollywood, the notion that if you’re pretty and have white teeth and just show up for the game then you’ll win.
My father, who was a cabinetmaker, told me, ‘Wood has a grain and if you go into the grain, you have beauty. If you go against it, you have splinters – it breaks.’ And I took that as my view of life. You have to follow the grain – to be sensitive to the direction of life.
People tend to fear the ghosts in their own family. You feel these family curses and think, ‘If it happened to my father, it could happen to me.’
You know, I’m behind my company. My company has been a big part of my life. And it’s not that I been buying a company or that my father bought a company and tried to do something out of it. You know, it’s not the same thing. It’s my name, it’s my company, it’s my signature.
Theater was definitely part of my roots. My father would take me to plays, and then my mother was always on the lookout for other talent and taking me to see plays. I saw Frank Langella in ‘Dracula’… Great, great performances. I was a theater rat, hanging out backstage.
My father was an actor, and my mother was his agent, so I had it on both sides: the crazy actor and his representation.
The first job I had was a Pampers commercial. And I used to go with my father whenever he would do a performance. I remember clinging to his legs, saying, ‘Please. Take me with you.’
My father’s in the military, so we moved a lot. I was born in Jersey but grew up in Maryland until we moved to L.A. to pursue my acting career. Music came into it after that.
Even if I accepted that Jesus – like almost every other prophet on record – was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.
My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
My father is an intellectual and physical man, which is a rather unusual combination. He’s great. As he brought up me and my brothers and sisters, he ingrained in us that your appearance is not your responsibility, other than that you should not be a slob.
My father passed away a couple of years ago, but he was very old. He was almost a 100 years old. And, you know, he had a very good life. He came to America and he had a good life.
One thing that’s happened to me is I’ve been around a long time and I’ve played a lot of villains and so forth. I think it had to do with, well one thing is that I looked younger than I was for a long time. Now I think I’m suddenly starting to play people’s father.
My father was a lesson. He had his own bakery, and it was closed one day a week, but he would go anyway. He did it because he really loved his bakery. It wasn’t a job.
My father worked for the railroad, and whenever a train crashed, we would go as a family and steal food from the boxcars. One year we stole a case of butterscotch pudding that was for export to Israel. It took us years to get through.
My father used to call me ‘bird bones’ and, well, the name fits.
I think my father thought I might be president of the United States. I think he would’ve been satisfied with secretary of state. I’m a foreign policy person, and to have a chance to serve my country as the nation’s chief diplomat at a time of peril and consequence, that was enough.
In our personal lives, we have a lot of businesses going on. I have a profession, I’m a father, a spouse, a good member of my community. How much of my time and energy can I allocate to each of those things? What I allocate becomes the strategy I have for my family, and everything else.
My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.
I’ve started looking at my own father a bit funny. He assures me, though, that I really am the son of a Scottish postman.
The North African mule talks always of his mother’s brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.
My son is 7 years old. I am 54. It has taken me a great many years to reach that age. I am more respected in the community, I am stronger, I am more intelligent and I think I am better than he is. I don’t want to be a pal, I want to be a father.
My grandfather lived to be late 90s on one side and on the other side, 70s or something. And my father died young, at 63. But he didn’t take very good care of himself.
When I was born, the economy wasn’t in a great state it was the Depression, and my father had to be quick to try and find work.
For each gene in your genome, you quite often get a different version of that gene from your father and a different version from your mother. We need to study these relationships across a very large number of people.
People are comprised of sets of DNA from each parent. If you looked at just the DNA from your father, it wouldn’t tell you who you really are.
I don’t hide my feelings, but when it comes to illness, I guess I don’t panic. My father was the same way. I’m the provider for the family and the caretaker. If I panic, who is anybody going to run to?
I grew up trying to be like my idols, and one of the main people in my life was my father. He played football, and when your father is telling stories about the game he played… Everybody wants to be like their father.
My father always wanted me to play a musical instrument, and I never had that type of skill.
I’m a war baby: I was brought up with rationing, and my parents always had to struggle. I remember when I was sent to boarding school – Prior Park College in Bath – my father was asked how he was going to pay the fees, and he replied: ‘In arrears.’
I come from a simple background, so I couldn’t call my father and say, ‘Come pay my bills,’ so I had to get out there and work.
My father always told me, ‘Before you become a queen, you have to learn how to take care of your own things.’ So I knew how to do all of it, but I had never really done it on a daily basis. So I was cleaning houses, and I started working restaurants.
Morning Joe’ host Mika Brzezinski’s personal life is a minefield. Her father is Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and while one brother is an Obama appointee, the other advises Romney.
My father is a silent cinema freak, so he took me to 1925 silent films that took forever, like 5-hour movies, but I’ve seen a lot of that stuff since I was young. And then I saw the film ‘Annie,’ and I just wanted to be Annie I just wanted to be that orphan kid and wanted to sing and dance.
Christmas is taken very seriously in this household. I believe in Father Christmas, and there’s no way I’d do anything to undermine that belief.
My father was the king of the joke-tellers. I was so impressed as a child watching him, holding people in rapt attention.
My father was a really funny guy. He lived a good long life. And he was the reason I wanted to be funny and become a comedian and a comedy writer, so to say that he’s somewhat of a mythic figure in my life would be an understatement.
There was a great strain in our family because my father didn’t want anything to do with me. He was happy to see my brother and sister, but not me. I don’t know why. Maybe it was shame. I don’t know. But he never wanted anything to do with me. That rejection was terribly hurtful and it went on for years.
The happiest years of my mother’s life were spent in Washington, D.C. It was where she met my father, where John was born and where I spent my earliest years.
I grew up in a household where reading was encouraged. My mother believed in the power of words, and my father obviously did too.
I don’t remember my father reading to me, but I remember him telling me bedtime stories. I got to pick what was in them, and then he’d make them up.
I feel that my father’s greatest legacy was the people he inspired to get involved in public service and their communities, to join the Peace Corps, to go into space. And really that generation transformed this country in civil rights, social justice, the economy and everything.
My father used to say, ‘Let them see you and not the suit. That should be secondary.’
My mum left my dad when I was six months old, so I don’t know him at all. I had no male figures in my life, really. I had my godfather, but he’s more like a grandfather, so I was quite sheltered. I’ve never tried to find my father.
If my father’s business hadn’t gone broke, I’d be exporting nuts, bolts and sugar machinery right now. What an awful thought!
Due to a big bust in Cuba, my father’s business suffered badly, so I was free to choose my own career. I became a professional dancer, and I went on the road and started making real money.
I am from a woman’s family. My great-grandmother had three daughters and a son. My grandmother had two daughters, and my mother had two daughters. My sister had a daughter and then finally a son. You should have seen my father with the son. He could not believe that finally there was a boy in the family.
I remember my father saying to me once, ‘I finally know how to describe you, Charlotte. You’re prickly.’ And he was right – prickly is a very good description. If I had to be an animal, I’d probably be a porcupine.
My mother’s incredible diaries, which she’d written from when she was 21, and even before that. She fell in love with my father when she was 12.
I’d had a French education for three years, my father being in the army. From 9 to 12, I went to French school. I’ve been sort of part of the culture, part of the geography, since I was quite young – the imprint was there.
I come from a strong matriarchal line. I was raised by Gypsy, her sister, Mary, and my maternal grandmother. The result of not having my father live with us meant that, when it came to understanding the opposite sex, it was like working without a map.
A kshatriya woman’s highest purpose in life is to support the warriors in her life: her father, brother, husband and sons.
I have an evolving relationship with my father, and his memory, especially the older I get. I know that some of the things that interested him are things that interest me.
I’ve always liked the idea of being a father. And I’ve always romanticised it, because I lost my father when I was young. In a way, all of the complications that come with my career are about that.
I definitely had those moments, like any actor, when you get anxious and think, ‘When am I going to work again?’ But I would feel that way even when I had every offer in the world coming to me. Then I became a father and I felt a little more of the anxiety that came with the responsibility of being a parent.
My father, a captain in the 5th Battalion of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, landed in Normandy the day after D-Day.
When my father passed away and then when later on I gave birth, those are sort of ground-breaking experiences that put everything else into perspective.
Oprah is signed on to help, and a lot of celebrity friends have agreed to help me raise money for Make-A-Wish. We want to make the world a better place for innocent children. I cried my heart out when my father died from cancer. I wish I was smarter, wiser like a doctor, to save these children from dying.
I cast my first vote on my father’s lap in 1960, for Richard Nixon, in the voting booth. I was 8.
The tradition of putting candles on Christmas trees actually began in Germany. The person who came up with the idea is thought to have been Martin Luther, father of the Reformation.
My father was a teacher, and there were teachers all around, his friends, they were working for the Government and their behaviour was within strictly limited areas.
On October 28th, 1887, I became the mother of a girl baby, the very image of its father, at least that is what he said, but who has the temper of its mother.
If you are a good person, you will probably be a good father. Try not to worry too much. If you don’t feel apprehensive just before your first child arrives, you are abnormal. Though catastrophe doesn’t come as often in childbirth as it did a few generations ago, we naturally fear it.
Being a father can ‘unreason’ your worldview, or at least make it very flexible, and that can create all sorts of fun and insights. It’s sad that children’s open-eyed wonder and sense of play begin to fade as they approach adolescence. One grand function of fathering is to keep the fading to a minimum.
In my case, a papadaddy is a father. My paternal grandfather was called Papa by my father who was called Daddy by me.
I was baptized Methodist, but I was mainly raised First Church of NFL, which is to say that my family, especially my father, was much more concerned with watching football on Sundays than attending services.
My mom cooked for us, and on the weekend, we always had Sunday dinner. My father liked to bake.
I want my daughter to see that I am a professional and have commitments, but that I’m there when the family needs me, and so is their father. In some cases, more so.
I grew up Catholic. My mother is from El Salvador, so my family on her side is Roman Catholic. My father is Protestant, and while he was spiritual, he wasn’t much of a churchgoing person. I think it’s fairly common for families to be brought up in the mother’s religion.
Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.
I still have a stammer that I can control by not opening a sentence with a hard consonant, or by concentrating for a moment, breathing softly down. Growing up, the ‘Our Father’ was lovely, made for me, the ‘Hail Mary’ was gorgeous, and ‘Glory Be to the Father’ was an absolute nightmare.
My father, Abe, was a small businessman. For 32 years, he ran an exterminating company. That may explain why our family always associated the smell of roach spray with love.
I was encouraged by my mother and, to a lesser extent, by my father.
My grandfather died when I was 12, but I remember the sorrow of my mother. Even now, she’s an old lady, but when she speaks about her father, she looks young. A love like that is undefeated, you know?
My mother’s a police officer, so there was only so much trouble I could get myself into. But my father grew up on the other side.
Yes, my mother was a singer, and my father played piano and keyboards. They were in a band together, though they also had regular jobs because they had kids and stuff like that.
I’m from California, but my father, who passed away when I was young, was from Newark. When I was kid, we would go back east and catch Yankees games. His side of the family are big Yankees fans. But, the real connection came in ’97 when I moved to New York and became friends with the team.
I think I was well brought up, for my father and mother were of one mind regarding the care of the family.
My mother Diana was a true-blue aristocrat, descended from William the Conqueror and listed in ‘Burke’s Peerage.’ My father David, from a poor Scottish family, was a doctor.
I idolize my father. I mean, he has worked so hard in his life.
We arrived the way most emigrant families did. My father came first, and the rest of us – my mother, my sister and me – followed a year later.
I’m half-Armenian. Even though my grandparents did not discuss the genocide, and my father – like many sons and daughters of immigrants – wanted to be as ‘American’ as possible, I was always aware of it. How could I not be?
My mother was a teacher, my father was a community organizer. I come from a working class background.
People like Aphex Twin, Jason Pierce, Jarvis Cocker and William Orbit are actively showing their interest in a wider field of music. Jarvis and I met on a benefit for an extraordinary man called LaMonte Young, the father of minimalism, who worked with John Cale and shared a loft with Yoko Ono.
One thing I am certain of is that, if I have done anything good in music, it was, first, because of my father, and second, because of my wife.
No, I never thought about my father’s money as my money.
My father was short for a man, with a child’s plaything for a name – Spinner. He had flawless dark brown skin and a head full of big, wet-looking curls, black as oil. And he had the smile of a scoundrel – the kind of smile that disarmed men and undressed women.
In 1989, my father died after a prolonged struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. All four of his siblings followed him into the shadow lands of that fascinating, maddening affliction.
Tiger had the advantage of high school, college, and a father who knew golf. I was self-taught. Blacks really won’t play golf in great numbers until some of these basketball and football stars buy some golf courses where blacks can play.
I was an only child of a father who loved me deeply, but we didn’t play catch, even though I was an athlete. We didn’t go fishing or hunting or any of the things I wanted to do. Why not? He just didn’t do that.
When you’re little, your father is your hero. Mine was. Then it all becomes more complicated.
In 1966, I bought my parents a carriage clock for their silver wedding anniversary. It was last wound 30 years later, in December 1996, the month my father died.
If someone like my father chooses to criticise Israeli policies, it’s not because he is a self-hating Jew, but because he is not prepared to live in a state of self-denial.
As the youngest, I wanted to be my father’s son and perpetuate the family name.
I was born in the small town of Gorizia, Italy, on 31 March, 1934. My father was an electrical engineer at the local telephone company and my mother an elementary school teacher.
When I was young I would spend more money than I should with my credit card but my father cut it off, so I had to find creative ways of making money.
I was always into fashion, and used to go on spending sprees when I was a university student in Miami. My father would be furious, but I would always say, ‘It was an emergency! I had a party to go to!’
My father worked in high-energy nuclear physics, and my mother was a mycologist and a geneticist. After both parents completed postdoctoral fellowships in San Diego in 1962, my father took a faculty position in the Physics Department at Yale, and so the family moved to New Haven, Connecticut.
When I was nine, we moved to Stanford University in San Francisco so that my father could do a Ph.D. I went to Terman Junior High in Palo Alto. It was terrible, because my hormones were all over the place, and I became an ugly adolescent full of rage and loathing.
I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley’s translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.
My father was very interested in music, and when he and his brothers were young, they had a singing group that used to open for Sam Cooke. There was always music in our house, but there wasn’t much art around.
To Kill a Mockingbird’ is really two stories. One is a coming-of-age tale told from the point of view of Scout Finch, a girl of about nine, and her slightly older brother, Jem. The second story concerns their father, attorney Atticus Finch, who has been appointed to defend a black man, Tom Robinson, falsely accused of raping a white woman.
Harper Lee and Truman Capote became friends as next-door neighbors in the late 1920s, when they were about kindergarten age. From the start, they recognized in each other an apartness
The English was really my mother, it was never me. Being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French.
My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the ’50s.
My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.
My father got a phone call to bring me in to meet with Spielberg for ‘E.T.,’ partially because they knew I was a physical kid, and I was known in the business somewhat as a stunt kid, and I could do all the bicycle riding.
My father was a writer I’ve known a lot of children of writers – daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.
A journalist asked this to my father. He spent a day with me and interviewing my friends/colleagues and didn’t understand how I could be the one that created 4chan and, as he put it, ‘couldn’t understand how to fit the square peg into a round hole.’ The best way I have of describing it is, ‘I didn’t define it, and it doesn’t define me.’
My father wanted me to be a pharmacist like himself. He had been a doctor, but he no longer believed in medicine so he became a pharmacist, but he believed in that hardly more.
I could, I think, quite easily have gone to Oxford. I got four good A levels, but my father’s income was such that I wouldn’t have got a grant, and he wouldn’t let me go to university, and that was the end of it.
I was brought up west southwest coast of Scotland and my mother and father had a music shop, and so I was surrounded by pianos and drums and guitars, and music, of course.
I am a father, and sometimes I want to stay close to home. By varying the workplace, it gives me space to breathe. I enjoy theatre because it reminds me I’m mortal, and it’s terrifying when it goes wrong but the most thrilling experience when it flies.
My birth neither shook the German Empire nor caused much of an upheaval in the home. It pleased mother, caused father a certain amount of pride and my elder brother the usual fraternal jealousy of a hitherto only son.
My father died. It is still a deep regret to me this day that in choosing acting as my career I was forced to hurt him. He died too early to see I had done the right, the only thing.
Being a father of three children and grandfather to nine, I do think that this thing called ‘parenting’ is becoming increasingly difficult.
I’ve got a lot to look forward to. I’m trying to be the best father I can, and that’s a pretty important role. Some would say it’s more important than stopping pucks.
With a name like Cush Jumbo, you never get forgotten. The ‘Jumbo’ is from my father, who is Nigerian, and ‘Cush’ was a king in ancient Egypt. It’s a name that took a few years to grow into, but now I feel it was meant to be. It’s absolutely who I am, and I love it.
I was named after the great emperor Cyrus as my father, Farokh Broacha, was a great admirer of the Persian emperor. Continuing the tradition, I have named my son after Mikhail Gorbachev, someone whom I admire. He gave his people freedom.
When I was young, I didn’t want to do traditional painting and calligraphy. I deliberately wanted to separate from my father so I could feel I existed myself.
Even though Chinese society was really closed, there were two windows for me to explore the world. One was from my mother and grandmother, the unseen and invisible world. Another window was brought from my father’s side, those classic and Western books.
The first time my father saw me in the flesh was on the stage, which is a bit weird. We went out to dinner, and he was charming and sweet, but I did all the talking.
We all know the personal relationship between Michel Platini and President Blatter. It was like a mentor and protege, or even father and son.
It used to be that a son could look at the father, and pretty much know what life was gonna be like as an adult. There was confidence in that, and comfort in that, and frustration also.
Qinghua was first established as a preparatory school in 1911. In 1928, it became a university. In 1929, my father joined Qinghua as a professor, so that was also the year that I moved to that campus because my father brought the whole family along.
Pinocchio, spurred on by the hope of finding his father and of being in time to save him, swam all night long.
Our father has always been very passionate about taekwondo. In all honesty, we were forced into it without a choice. He would train us every other night at home, so we would always be perfecting our technique.
Very few people are blessed enough to call their father a legend, and an even smaller number are able to share that notion with the rest of the world.
I’m still waiting for Peter Jackson to let me play an elf. I want to play Orlando Bloom’s father. No, Orlando Bloom’s younger, hotter brother. I don’t think it’s going to happen.
The world is a challenging place in terms of wars and peace, basic human rights and freedoms. The Holy Father has a major role to play in global affairs. The pope is more than a spiritual leader. For the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, he is an inspiration of holiness and goodness and, above all, the faithful proclamation of the Gospel.
I lost my father four years ago to what was the culmination of a manic episode that seemingly, to my family, came completely out of the blue after 59 years on this earth with no issues that we knew about, at least – sort of a normal run-of-the-mill guy who did his job and came home and had a family.
My father was, like, the token bad white guy in all the old Jackie Chan/Bruce Lee films.
I was born during the war, on October 20, 1942, as the second of five children. My father, Rolf Volhard, was an architect.
I have three wonderful children. My husband is an absolutely wonderful, perfect husband and a father, most of all.
My father started out as a riveter, but he had the soul of an artist. He worshiped Shakespeare and had aspirations to be an actor. He claimed that from the first day he laid eyes on me, I was going to be this great dramatic actress.
My father knew the charming side of my mother, and my mother thought that he was attentive and pleasant and was an architect, which was a respectable profession, but I don’t think that they actually got to know one another deeply.
My father Bill had a problem with Christmas. Although he appears in old photographs to possess a whippy, muscular frame, he was actually a frail man and usually managed to cause some kind of drama just before the festivities began.
By the time I reached the sixth form at my local grammar school, my father would glower at me every time I passed him with a stack of books under my arm, warning me there was no money to go to university.
Well, I have a Norwegian father who emigrated to America in the 1950s, and he still speaks with varying degrees of an accent. Over my lifetime my ear has been well-tuned to that accent. Any first generation kid has that wonderful gift from their parents.
Maybe it was the home tutoring, or the late start to formal schooling, or an overly cautious and protective upbringing, but in any case, I never became a talkative person. As an adult, I am not always comfortable in social gatherings with small talk. I must have inherited my father’s gentle nature.
I come from a wonderful family. My mother was a pianist and my father was a salesman. They were very middle-class, very middle-Western.
I don’t appreciate Internet cyber bullying at all. It’s not fair. With me, it gets hard because I have four children. My 8 year old son reads lies about his father, when I’m his hero.
I’m a father of four so whenever I’m not working my kids have their different sports, or plays, or school performances, so I don’t do a whole lot of other stuff besides being a dad.
My father always told me that story was first and foremost. We would watch not just his films but a lot of classic American films. My father was a great David Lean fan, and David Lean’s one of my favorite directors. We would discuss films endlessly.
I think in any relationship, even in the healthiest of relationships, we are all parents to each other at times. I think that’s a normal, healthy sort of relationship. I think there are times when we’re each a mother and a father when we need to be.
In this movie, you have all the things you love from Tim. All the magic and the whimsy and the surreal, but he also has a fantastic story of a father and son that really gets under your skin.
I was raised in an observant Jewish household, so for me, Hebrew prayers – the sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass windows of a synagogue – bring my father back to me as surely as if he were sitting next to me, my head pressed against his shoulder.
My father told me ‘Name your price in the beginning. If it ever gets more expensive than the price you name, get out of there.’
In my mother’s belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.
Growing up, I’ve enjoyed hunting with my father.
I still relate to my father very much. I mean, I talk to him in a certain way, as we do talk to the dead.
I had a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father.
Motivation aside, if people get better at these life skills, everyone benefits: The brain doesn’t distinguish between being a more empathic manager and a more empathic father.
Every sincere prayer is heard and answered by our Heavenly Father, but the answers we receive may not be what we expect or come to us when we want or in the way we anticipate.
Within the walls of our own homes, we can and should bear pure testimony of the divinity and reality of the Father and the Son, of the great plan of happiness, and of the Restoration.
If all opposition were curtailed, if all maladies were removed, then the primary purposes of the Father’s plan would be frustrated.
The revelations of the Father and the Son are conveyed through the third member of the Godhead, even the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is the witness of and messenger for the Father and the Son.
As a father, I would say I am more like a mother. I do a lot of hugging.
I missed my father so much when he died that writing about his life and mine was a way of bringing him back to life and getting me to sort of understand more about him and what made him the father, the husband and the man that he was, and how that made me the man, husband and father that I am.
My father was a tailor, my mother a machinist.
I’m a strong person, I’m a strong family man, I’m a strong husband and a strong father.
In my career, there’s many things I’ve won and many things I’ve achieved, but for me, my greatest achievement is my children and my family. It’s about being a good father, a good husband, just being connected to family as much as possible.
My mother was Catholic, my father was Protestant. There was always a debate going on at home – I think in those days we called them arguments – about who was right and who was wrong.
I’ve always regretted that I never was able to talk openly with my parents, especially with my father. I’ve heard and read so many things about my family that I can no longer believe anything every relative I question has a completely different story from the last.
If you put the talent of all my brothers together, they wouldn’t add up to the talent that was in my father.
My mother, Evelyn, was an actress and singer, and my father, Jack, was an actor. My earliest recollection of my father is being taken to see him in a matinee.
When I was 11, I moved to Los Angeles to live with my father and stepmother and my half brothers. I became really close to my stepmother, and I am still very close to my brothers. My stepmother is the actress Shirley Jones, who was in ‘The Partridge Family’ alongside me, so we worked together for years.
As a father, I do everything my dad didn’t do. My son Beau’s birth changed my life.
One of the scary things is that, when you’re a kid, you look at your dad as the man who has no fear. When you’re an adult, you realize your father had fear, and that you have it, too.
Duch’ means spirit and ‘ovny’ is kind of the adjectival ending, so the word itself means spiritual. It’s my father’s name, obviously. He took the ‘H’ out because he was tired of people saying Duchovny, but he never did it legally. When my parents divorced, my mother, to my father, put the ‘H’ back in.
I think my father would have liked to have been an artist, actually. But I think he didn’t quite have perhaps the drive or, I don’t know, I mean he had a family to bring up I suppose.
My father spent his entire early career as an illustrator for comic books: EC Comics like ‘Tales from the Crypt’ and ‘Creepshow,’ then moving on to such magazines as ‘Mad’ and ‘Weird Science.’
There’s sometimes a weird benefit to having an alcoholic, violent father. He really motivated me in that I never wanted to be anything like him.
A friend at school was always being laughed at because his father emptied dustbins for a living. But those who laughed worshipped famous footballers. This is an example of our topsy-turvy view of ‘success.’ Who would we miss most if they did not work for a month, the footballer or the garbage collector?
My mother, Maxine, was married at 16 to my father Raymond, and in 56 years together, he was the only man she ever had.
In little more than a generation, feminism has obliterated roles. If you wonder why so many men choose not to get married, the answer lies in large part in the contemporary devaluation of the husband and of the father – of men as men, in other words.
As a kid, I was always building things. My father had a shop in the house, and we built things – we were kind of a project family. I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema, and in cinema, you get to build so many things, or help build them.
My mother cared a lot about clothes. It was a point of friction because when I was a teenager, and I only wanted to wear my father’s shirts, and I never wanted to wear makeup, she would say: ‘Put on lipstick.’ That was her thing.
I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities.
My father was a doctor, an army cardiologist.
I think for everything that people say about me as a person today – whether it’s about being disciplined and grounded or whatever – I think a lot of it is a credit to my father, who has been a massive influence in my life both professionally and personally.
The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.
Mubarak would meet with me when I was at Central Command. He would lean and put his hand on my knee, as if a father figure, and say, ‘General, don’t ever forget the Arab Street. Listen to the Arab Street.’ I’d like to go to him now and say, ‘Mr. President, what about that Arab Street, what’s that all about?’
My own interest in art was because of my mother. My father didn’t like contemporary art, so he didn’t give her large sums to spend. So, she began buying prints and drawings. During my school days, I remember sitting in on many of the early meetings.
Father was the eldest son and the heir apparent, and he set the standard for being a Rockefeller very high, so every achievement was taken for granted and perfection was the norm.
My father could swear in Gaelic and English, by the way, ladies and gentlemen.
My father left Ireland because he did not want to muck horse manure for the rest of his life, and he wanted to come to New York.
I know some of my parents’ friends think ‘Little Britain’ is in incredibly poor taste. But swimming the Channel? You can’t really say anything negative about that, can you? There’s nothing better than making your parents happy. The glee on my father’s face that day was amazing.
I am not officially involved now in the direction of the Teen Challenge ministry, but I rejoice that God permits me to be the father of these ministries.
When I turned 11, we had to leave East Germany overnight because of the political orientation of my father. Now I was going to school in West Germany, which was American-occupied at that time. There in school, all children were required to learn English and not Russian. To learn Russian had been difficult, but English was impossible for me.
I stayed focused, and I never surrendered, and now I’ve been blessed. now I take care of my mother, my father, and my entire whole family.
I grew up around lots of men – my father, my brothers, my uncles – so I wasn’t intimidated by them.
My father was very energetic my mother was very energetic. He lived to a very old age, and so did my mother. I believe that I just have it from my father, from my parents. They had wonderful energy.
My father was a successful real estate developer, and he was a very tough man but a good man. My father would always praise me. He always thought I was the smartest person.
What my father gave me more than anything else is great tutoring and a great brain, frankly. You know, my father’s brother was a top person at MIT, went to MIT, graduated from MIT, was a teacher at MIT, a professor at MIT, a great engineer. I mean, you know, I have very good genes.
The World War I, I’m a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it’s like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.
My father was an insurance man and a small-time gambler. He was a good man, but he had an eye for the racehorses, and I saw how it used to bother my mother. I’ve never gambled a dime. Never, in all those years in Vegas.
I was 28 when my father died, and I was an only child.
My father has never once asked me a question, any question. There’s a freedom that came from that. It allowed me to create my own way of thinking.
Great dad. Yeah, he would ask me for money on birthdays and, you know, inappropriate times. And I just wrote him off like, ‘You’re not a father.’ I just learned you cannot emotionally invest in people who are not attainable.
I’ve certainly never used my father’s name as a way of getting a meeting. And fortunately, I’ve never needed to.
Hopefully, by the second or the third film, who my father is won’t be a story anyone’s interested in. They’ll either like the films or they won’t, and if they don’t like them, I won’t be making them any more.
I coached against Dave the last couple of years, and I was very proud to be the first time a father ever coached against his son. He beat me for 30 minutes the first time and 59 and a half minutes the second time.
My real father died when I was two years old, so I never knew him. He was a barber in Chicago.
If you’re old enough to father a child, then you’re old enough to accept financial responsibility for that child. If you don’t want your embarrassing, unlawful, and irresponsible behavior going viral, man up and pay up.
As a father, safety is always a top of mind issue for me.
At 9 years old, I moved in with my father because my mother could no longer care for me. Looking back, I now see so many similarities between my own childhood and that of my sons. My father stepped in when I needed him, and that gave me the chance for a better life. That’s what I’m doing for my boys now.
I received most of my business education around the dinner table. Whether I listened to my father or brothers, or we had business people as dinner guests, I learned from everyone.
I remember, when I was doing ‘Nicholas Nickleby’, James Archer came to see me at the interval and said, ‘My father would like to see you after the show.’ It felt rather as if I had been summoned by the Queen, and I was cocky enough to think, ‘Who the hell is he to summon me?’
My father has been a voice of encouragement in times of desperation for so many people. But he died when I was so young that, for me, his music has been a way for me to get to know him better.
My father – until the day that my dad died – didn’t know how many points you scored in a touchdown. He could say there were nine innings in baseball, but no intricacies of the sport.
My father always taught me to appreciate what you’re fortunate to have and give back to those who need it. No part of our society is more important than the children, especially the ones who need our help.
I’ve written something like 17 novels, which isn’t bad, I suppose, but my father wrote 120 books, my mother 40. In comparison, I’m lazy.
I went to my first dinosaur hall with my father and twin brother. We went to the American Museum of Natural History, and I was blown away by the dinosaurs.
I wanted to be like my father, who was a cattle man and a rodeo roper. And that was – he was my hero, and I wanted to be more like him.
I have no regrets. I wanted to raise the kids and be a present father. When I developed a movie, I was gone for a year. That didn’t really work for me. That isn’t fair to make these life-forms and then disappear.
I consider myself a human being, a Christian, a father, a husband, so many things, before being a black person.
My father worked in a post office and never made probably more than $8,000 a year as an employee of the post office, so when people can rise up from very modest circumstances and do well economically, I think that’s a good thing about America, and we should encourage that kind of activity.
Right now, I think I have time to be three things, in no particular order: a father, a husband, and a filmmaker. That’s why I don’t go out – I have no space for it. I feel like one of those main things would suffer.
I learned a lot in those first years in Miami, while struggling just for survival, by observing my father’s fortitude.
It’s maybe hard to believe, but as a kid I really had a lot of self-doubts. My father was very ill – he was an alcoholic – so there were a lot of things that built up for me. And because I was going to a Catholic school in a small German town, a lot of it was suppressed. I was angry and didn’t know how to get it out.
I was raised by free-spirited people, though my father gave me a very strong work ethic.
Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, ‘It was a perfect script for she and I,’ inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, ‘Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?’
By the time I was in the fourth grade, I sounded exactly like my father on the phone.
I met Leo Fender, who is the guru of all amplifiers, and he gave me a Stratocaster. He became a second father to me.
Guitar Player Magazine says Dick Dale is the father of Heavy Metal, blowing up 48 amplifiers, creating the first power amplifier.
It’s been a process of evolving within a family company to get the autonomy I now have from a boss like my father. If you’re sitting there waiting for a pat on the back, you’re going to be waiting a long time.
People talk, ‘Oh your father’s a misogynist, look what he said about women,’ like, on ‘Howard Stern.’ When he gets with Howard Stern, who’s a friend of his, he’ll joke around, because it’s a comedy show. He’s allowed to have a personality.
When I spent time with my father, it wasn’t playing ball in the back yard. I came to his office and listened to him do business or sat in on meetings. I walked job sites. On Saturday, we’d see my grandfather in Queens for a couple hours, and then he’d say, ‘Let’s go collect rent!’
My father’s not the type of person that teaches you by saying, ‘Come here, son. I’m going to tell you about real estate.’ You learn by watching it. If you don’t pick it up, it’s your problem.
My father is a very hardworking guy, and that’s his focus in life, so I got a lot of the paternal attention that a boy wants and needs from my grandfather.
I think I probably got a lot of my father’s natural security or ego or whatever. I can be my own person and not have to live under his shadow. I definitely look up to him in many ways – I’d like to be more like him when it comes to business – but I think I’m such a different person, it’s hard to even compare us.
What’s great about my father is that, because we’ve been involved in the business from such a young age, he’s given us – and we’ve earned – autonomy, and he’s given us the rope to go out and grow the brand.
I believe the most compelling explanation of Obama’s actions is that he is, just like his father, an anti-colonialist.
Obama remains frozen in his father’s time machine. His anti-colonialism is the anti-colonialism of Africa in the 1950s: state confiscation of land, confiscatory taxation, and so on. My anti-colonialism is the anti-colonialism of India in the 21st century.
If Obama came by his liberalism in the faculty lounge, then sure, he can see it hasn’t worked, and he can modify it. But if Obama got his formative ideas when he was very young, and if they are the result of his traumatic relationship with his father, then they are built into his psyche.
Do you know that other than my father, I’ve never had a man take care of me?
My father instilled in me the attitude of prevailing. If there’s a challenge, go for it. If there’s a wall to break down, break it down.
Our father taught us such a work ethic that if there’s something worth doing, it’s worth doing well.
Florenz Ziegfeld, to us and our family, was just a delightful person. My sisters, Mary and Pearl, my brother Charlie and I all worked for him, and he treated us just beautifully, almost like a father. When I went with my mother up to his office, he was always gentlemanly and kindly. He was sort of a quiet person.
I think the universe was preparing me to be an actor. I never pursued one thing for long, but I was jack of all trades. I was learning everything possible because I knew my father would never shell out money for dresses or parties, but he would always give me money for new courses and books.
My dad was very intelligent, had a very strong personality. I was amazed with my father.
When I was younger, my father told me not to pigeonhole the way that I perceive myself.
I saw ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ the week that it came out. My father was a huge ‘Star Wars’ fan. And so when it came out, my dad took me.
I think by my father owning a store, I was definitely aware of the commercial aspect of selling clothes. His shop was a place I enjoyed spending time in as a boy, so I learned things almost by osmosis at times, by literally just being around all the action and not really despite myself.
I’ve been a biker, I’ve been a convict, I’ve been a husband, father, and son.
It’s just like being a father you got to show them love and you got to show them the path. I don’t like this role-model stuff, though.
Well, my first languages are German and Spanish because I was brought up by a Spanish mother and a German father, so I always spoke both languages at home. I’m very thankful that I was brought up in a bilingual house.
My first languages are German and Spanish because I was brought up by a Spanish mother and a German father, so I always spoke both languages at home. I’m very thankful that I was brought up in a bilingual house.
I started to do theater when I was a little boy at school, and then, I think because my father was a documentary filmmaker and worked for German television, I was of course fascinated by what he did.
I started to do theater when I was a little boy at school, and then, I think because my father was a documentary filmmaker and worked for German television, I was of course fascinated by what he did. Then when I was around 15, I did my first movie.
I write in order to express what the photo itself cannot say. A photograph of my father doesn’t tell me what I thought of him, which for me is much more important than what the man looked like.
My father took me to my first game in 1971, and I fell in love with the Redskins and the NFL right then. I was hooked. And we didn’t even win that game.
My father was a good man, but he was a con man. He was a wanderer, nomadic.
My father never saw me play ball, and I was an outstanding ballplayer. I missed all that adoration.
My father was never around. It was almost as if he didn’t exist. I would tell my friends he was in Cleveland, on business. Sometimes, every six months or so, he would come by for dinner.
Why should I ever get fed up talking about my father? He was a brilliant, colorful man who left us with thousands of memories. Most people remember his films, but I’ve got anecdotes and advice and episodes of real life tucked away inside my head.
I guess I’ve played a lot of failures, which is a Huston quality, I guess. I love losers, though, and have never met anyone who hasn’t been one sometime. I’m always looking to understand them, and my father had an extremely keen eye to be able to dissect and bring that forward in the way he told his stories.
I resisted the film business as long as I could, because of the big circus act and the amount of money that it costs to make films – I saw my father suffer through that.
I would want my legacy to be that I was a great son, father and friend.
If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn’t count.
My father and grandfather were businessmen. The family business was Adelphi Paints in New Jersey. When the first energy crisis came in the early 1970s, the business suffered.
My father and mother had tremendous integrity, and obviously that affected me.
My father and mother treated us children as intellectual equals, thus greatly bolstering our self-confidence and our interest in ideas of all kinds.
I populated ‘The Bourne Identity’ with real characters from American history, specifically characters from the Iran-Contra affair, which my father ran the investigation of. But at the heart of it was a fictional character.
I had no particular desire to be a personality like my father, nor was I equipped to be one. I was determined to be my own man, although having the Fairbanks name did make it easier to get into an office to see someone.
My father and Mary Pickford were the reigning stars of not just Hollywood but of the world. Well, to bear my father’s name was hard enough, but to work in pictures to boot was pretty foolhardy. In fact, my father was totally against it. He thought I should be off getting a good education and go into some safe profession.
I was a shy, awkward sort of a boy and my father’s frequent absences from home, along with my hero worship for him, made me even shyer.
In my day, the only people who achieved real independence were my father, Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin, who, with D. W. Griffith, formed United Artists. Other than that, everybody belonged to the big studios. They had no say in their own careers.
Until I was six years old we lived in the projects, then my two brothers and three sisters and I moved to a three-bed that my mother’s father built.
I have my opinions about the way my father was. But they are my opinions, not necessarily the truth, and they are certainly not the whole spectrum of what this man was going through. It’s my young, selfish interpretation of that person.
I want to be read, and I certainly want to sell, but I also see my father’s eye from Heaven: ‘Always write quality. It doesn’t matter if you sell if it’s good, it’s good – if you capture the complexity of life.’
My father was this huge, influential intellectual in the ’60s and ’70s. He was one of the main players in the cultural discussion in Sweden, the editor of papers.
We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.
Style is innate to who I am. My father gave me a picture the other day. I must have been about seven, and I had on wing-tip shoes and some cool pants. I thought, ‘Wow!’
It’s like, no matter what I do, I always feel like I’m five years old, and I end up in the back of my father’s car looking out the window, and nothing has changed in 25 years.
The summer before my third year of law school, I worked at a law firm in Washington, D.C. I turned 25 that July, and on my birthday, my father happened to be playing in a local jazz club called Pigfoot and invited me to join him. I hadn’t spent a birthday with him since I was 3, but I agreed.
My most vivid memory of my father centers on the day he left. It was warm, and my mother was especially short with Rhonda and me that afternoon, which I attributed to the heat. I was oblivious to the mounting hostilities in our basement apartment.
My father, who died a few years ago, was a good, simple, very honest man. His faith and affection for his family was just unassailable, without question.
My father died when I was really young, on Christmas Day.
My father’s encouragement is what has brought me this far, because when I grew up I wanted to be like him, and I knew I had that ability to become an athlete. Being an Olympian is one of the greatest things, and being an Olympic gold medallist is one of the most prestigious titles in the world.
I was very empty after my father passed away. It was an emotional time, as it would be for anyone, but to be in the studio every day was kind of cathartic and healing and it just seemed very natural to continue.
Like father, like son, four years and this president is done.
If I was good each week, my father would take me to a different pet store each Saturday. I had a snake, horny toads, turtles, lizards, rabbits, guinea pigs… I kept my alligator in the bathtub until it got too big.
I hope I will be remembered as a good father and a fair employer. And a good host, of course!
I worked in the family business, which was my father’s shoe making company that he had inherited from his father, and that led me to become interested in what could be achieved by a great Italian brand. That became my ambition as a young man.
My sensei was a British karate champion named Brian Fitkin. He was my mentor and because I had a hard relationship with my dad, he became a father figure to me.
I was an outcast growing up with a bunch of Christian people. My father didn’t go to church, and that was not good news if you lived right in the middle of it.
Any son of a dictator, I’m sure, has major issues with their relationship with their father.
My father ran a saloon in Kenosha, Wis., which is just about as rough a living as I can think of. It was brutal it scared the hell out of me. I was so petrified all the while I was a child, I didn’t know what I was doing half the time.
My father wasn’t allowing me control and the financial freedom that I was asking for. I was 17, about to be 18 within a year, so I started asking more questions because I felt that I needed to start learning about those things.
But seek till ye find, and, whatever ye find for the present, let your last act be to lay and leave yourselves on the righteousness of His Son, expecting life through His name, according to the promise of the Father.
To this day, I adore classical music, and I’m very interested in opera, which I found out later my father was also extremely fond of.
My father kind of had hopes that I was going to become an artist like him – the typical thing. Of course I could play guitar better than him when I was about 12. But I couldn’t paint better than him. So I went, ‘I’m going to be the guitarist of the house, not the painter.’
I’m a single father, I don’t like to be away from my son. So I’ll go out, make a film and come back. Repeat. And it’s worked out very well for the last 11 years.
I’m one of nine sisters. My parents were dairy farmers in Wisconsin. My father didn’t believe in girls doing farm work. Girls did housework, and he hired young men to do farm work. I would have preferred to be outside.
When I was 9, we moved to Osseo, Wis., where we owned a couple of hundred acres. My father was well respected in town.
Now, I had been drawing all this time – especially in France of course – so, when I came back, my father gave me the chance to do a cover for one of the books he published.
I admired my father very much… at the age of sixteen. But now I see that he was a brutal and cruel man, – but not without remorse, and that was what tortured us, his alternations.
I’m lucky that it’s about fashion and perfume and cosmetics. If my father had owned a tire company, I don’t know what I would have done.
I am one of four girls and was inspired by my father to dream big. Some girls want to be doctors, but I wanted to run a company.
When I was four or five, my father had a general store in Winchester and I don’t think the farmers could ever leave on Saturday afternoon until I had been placed up on the counter to sing.
I have a lot of rage about things that didn’t happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world – and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.
The best money advice ever given me was from my father. When I was a little girl, he told me, ‘Don’t spend anything unless you have to.’
My father was an American who could cuss in Italian and make an aria out of it. It was wonderful to watch. But then again, he was a Gemini. I believe in that stuff.
The anger that Uncle Junior has comes from my background. My father was the son of an Italian immigrant, and I’ve seen the fire of the Italian temperament. It can be explosive sometimes in ways that are both funny and tragic.
My father was this famous heart surgeon, a wonderful man… but there was something about me that drove him crazy.
My first job ever was selling balloons with my brother at parades when I was about six years old. My father wanted us to learn about money, how to make it, save it, spend it, etc.
My father is a Jehovah’s Witness, and he raised us under a very strict hand.
My father assigned me to keep his scrapbooks. At first I was interested in reading only his rave notices, but I got interested in reading what the critics were saying about whether the play was good or not.
My father was a minister, so I was a P.K., a preacher’s kid.
What made me want to go into doing comics was I was working as a laborer with my father, a gardener.
Then is when I decided to take it to Archie to see if they could do it as a comic book. I showed it to Richard Goldwater, and he showed it to his father, and a day or two later I got the OK to do it as a comic book.
When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.
My father had not even completed high school when he started as an office boy working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I am not sure that my mother completed high school.
Your father tells you a story when you’re a kid, or your mother or your uncle or whoever it is. You sit there with your mouth open, and your mind goes to all these places they’re telling you about that you’ve never seen, and you’re agape. You just can’t believe that things can happen like that – but it’s just so direct.
I didn’t want to use my father’s name. I don’t think I will ever want to use his influence… Never have I gone around asking people, ‘Do you know who I am…’ Even if it’s to cut a line at the airport.
He who obeys God’s laws finds him a father. He who disobeys them, finds him a judge.
I guess it kind of stemmed from my father. He was a union guy working for the meat plant down in Kansas City. He was a union guy, and I guess it was just in my blood.
Well, I was about six or seven, and my mother and father separated.
My father had slowed down playing a little… I was ’round 10 or 12 years old. Every time he put his guitar down, I pick it up.
As Asian-Americans, the charge that is often lobbed against us is sort of the least original: the idea that somehow we’re perpetual foreigners, that we can’t be trusted, and that even my father, who was patriotic to the point that it was kind of a joke among his children, would be accused of being disloyal to America.
In terms of fashion, I think the biggest influence that I had was my father. My pops, he was really into men’s fashion and read all of the magazines.
My father was a rabbi and had a little synagogue in Canada, so I’m from Canada. I left there at 16.
I believe in Father Frost. But not too deeply. But anyway, you know, I’m not one of those people who are able to tell the kids that Father Frost does not exist.
I don’t remember much of my childhood. My father passed away when I was six, and sadly, I don’t have the fuzziest, foggiest memory of him – what his voice was like, anything he ever said to me, nothing. My early years are a total blur.
My father, Fred Carter, Jr., is definitely an extraordinaire.
My father was a middle manager at an oil company, but I never knew anything about his work. Whatever business acumen I have just got gleaned over the years.
I had five sisters and one brother, so having a big family is a given for me, but now being a father, and trying to be a good father, I already have my work cut out for me.
As a husband, father and public servant, I’m thankful for the counsel and wisdom of my older brothers – Bill, who was a priest, and Kevin, who is a priest.
My dad is my best friend, my father, and my boss. When I do something that is exciting and he likes it, it feels three times as good as you can imagine.
On my mother’s side, I’m English, so that’s where the freckles come from. On my father’s side, I’m German, and he has the fantastic olive hues… I was given mum’s skin, whereas my brothers and sisters were given my dad’s skin. I do tan up quite well, but it takes me a bit longer.
I know a lot of people feel like they get eaten alive by New York, but I feel it more as a father figure or something – this huge presence watching over me. I definitely feel better and work freer here.
Every man plays many roles. So far, I have played father the best.
I took up acting upon the insistence of my filmmaker father, Kasthuri Raja. But I am glad for it: sometimes one identifies one’s calling sometimes it singles one out.
I come from a very humble background. My father had to work really hard to become an assistant director. For a large part of his youth, he worked in a mill and took up odd jobs to make ends meet. We lived in a small room and could only afford a meal a day.
I discovered that there is Indian blood in my ancestry on my father’s side – a fact that had not been talked about in my family. No wonder I’ve often been cast in exotic roles – Indian princesses, Russian revolutionaries, Algerians, Gypsies and Greeks.
My father was a very warm, gregarious, sociable person who had many interests. He lived his life very much in the present, full of activities and the next project. He had many hobbies. He was not given to retrospection.
My father said, If you want to do acting, you have to be successful, which is a silly thing to say.
My father died in 1930, but if you told him or anybody almost in that time that you’d be able to sit back in England and watch a cricket game in Australia, they’d have you put in the loony bin.
What everybody misses here is that we are doing the same thing my father did. He licensed and litigated and protected his property, and we have to follow the same tradition, because the way the law reads, if you don’t protect it, you lose it.
My father’s from Australia and my mother was born in India, but she’s actually Tibetan. I was born in Katmandu, lived there until I was eight, and then moved to Australia with my mother and father. So yeah, I’m very mixed up, been to many different schools.
I remember unbelievable tension in our home. There were lots of meetings, lots of worries. I remember my father told me I had to be careful of what I said on the phone because it was tapped. And I remember how his friends adored and revered him.
I am my father’s daughter: I have his language, his expressions.
When I was in college at Amherst, my father asked me a favor: to take one course in economics. I loved it – for the challenge of its mysteries.
I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn’t care later when I write about her.
My father was a military attache, so I’ve been traveling all my life.
My father was military, so I traveled a lot, so I had 13 to 15 first days in new schools. Bullies transcend culture, unfortunately, and I had to deal with them wherever I went. I knew how to defend myself. But I didn’t know how to fight.
Pride is the master sin of the devil, and the devil is the father of lies.
Nan Gorman was born in Memphis, Tenn., on St. Patrick’s Day. She moved to Hazard in 1929 when her father, James Hagan, a recent medical school graduate and aspiring surgeon, went to work there.
I grew up on the South Island of New Zealand, in a city chosen and beloved by my parents for its proximity to the mountains – Christchurch is two hours distant from the worn saddle of Arthur’s Pass, the mountain village that was and is my father’s spiritual touchstone, his chapel and cathedral in the wild.
When my father was born, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When I was born, it was Lithuania. When I left, it was Hungary. It is difficult to say where I come from.
My father was a first reader in the Christian Science Church, which is similar to being a preacher. There was no drinking, smoking or cursing.