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Parenting & Family Quote by Anthony Quinn

"I have a son in Barcelona whom I am madly in love with"

About this Quote

A line like this lands with a jolt because it breaks the expected grammar of celebrity confession. Anthony Quinn doesn’t say he has a child he loves; he says he has a son in Barcelona whom he’s “madly in love with.” The phrasing swerves toward romantic obsession, and that’s the point: it smuggles a private intensity into public language that usually keeps fatherhood safely sentimental.

Quinn’s persona was built on heat - the volcanic masculinity of Zorba, the larger-than-life lover, the man who takes up space. Here, that same voltage gets rerouted into parenting. “Barcelona” isn’t a neutral detail; it’s a cinematic location stamp, a city that reads as sensual, artistic, a little illicit. It implies distance, separate lives, maybe even secrecy. This isn’t the tidy image of the present, PTA dad. It’s the itinerant actor’s reality: families spread across geographies, affection competing with absences.

The subtext is equal parts devotion and admission. Quinn is insisting that paternal love can be total, irrational, even inconveniently consuming - a love that doesn’t fit neatly into the culturally approved script for men of his generation. There’s also a touch of self-mythmaking: the actor turning biography into drama, choosing words that sound like a movie because that’s how he knew to make truth legible.

It works because it’s slightly inappropriate. That friction forces you to feel the stakes: not just “I love my son,” but “this love reorganizes me.”

Quote Details

TopicSon
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Quinn, Anthony. (2026, January 15). I have a son in Barcelona whom I am madly in love with. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-have-a-son-in-barcelona-whom-i-am-madly-in-love-144503/

Chicago Style
Quinn, Anthony. "I have a son in Barcelona whom I am madly in love with." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-have-a-son-in-barcelona-whom-i-am-madly-in-love-144503/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I have a son in Barcelona whom I am madly in love with." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-have-a-son-in-barcelona-whom-i-am-madly-in-love-144503/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Anthony Add to List
Anthony Quinn on Paternal Love in Barcelona
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About the Author

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Anthony Quinn (April 21, 1915 - June 3, 2001) was a Actor from Mexico.

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