Father Quotes

"I had some vague memory of visiting Canberra as a lad, when we came up with my father by car. But when I made the long train journey from Sydney to Canberra and arrived at the little stop, I did wonder slightly whether this really was the national capital"

John Henry Carver, Physicist

"I was encouraged by my mother and, to a lesser extent, by my father"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"Born Berlin 1931, Germany, father a British diplomat, mother an American artist. Educated at various schools all over the world. 1958 Settled down to live in London. 1966 Became interested in photography through photographing my young children. No formal training"

Fay Godwin, Photographer

"My character Esteban is a guy who really didn't think he was gonna be there at this point in his life. He's in his early 30s. He's got a son. He's raising his son as a single father"

Esai Morales, Actor

"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"

Brian Austin Green, Actor

"My father was an Episcopalian minister, and I've always been comforted by the power of prayer"

Anna Lee, Actress

"I grew up in a very musical family, my father was a musician and a big band leader and made records"

Billy Sherwood, Musician

"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"

Boy George, Musician

"Theses officers were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist's house and got the dentist out of bed and shot him"

Bruno Schulz, Novelist

"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"

Conrad Veidt, Actor

"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"

Anna Neagle, Actress

"I suppose my father was more influential in my starting to play the guitar"

Andy Partridge, Musician

"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"

Beau Bridges, Actor

"My father was grounded, a very meat-and-potatoes man. He was a baker"

Anthony Hopkins, Actor

"I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again"

Enid Bagnold, Author

"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"

Christopher Durang, Playwright

"I don't run democracy. I train troops to defend democracy and I happen to be their surrogate father and mother as well as their commanding general"

Alfred M. Gray, Soldier

"Upon the death of my father, our family and myself were emotionally and financially exhausted"

Sam Sheppard, Scientist

"True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends' boyfriends - and he accepts it"

Larry McMurtry, Writer

"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"

Aaron Klug, Physicist

"I was angry about the fact that my father would beat my mother on a daily basis, that my mother would take it in turn and beat on me. I was an abused child. I was mad about all those things, very bitter and very angry"

Rick James, Musician

"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"

Agnes Smedley, Journalist

"My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her"

John Hurt, Actor

"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"

Alan Lomax, Writer

"I had three stages of knowing Wellington Mara. He was my boss for a long time and he was a father figure. And finally, as we got older, he was my friend"

Frank Gifford, Athlete

"My father was never anti-anything in our house"

Errol Flynn, Actor

"If you keep making jokes like that, somebody is going to shoot you, father"

Mary Todd Lincoln, First Lady

"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"

Christopher Plummer, Actor

"My father was an immigrant from Russia and my mother was first generation"

Arthur Rock, Businessman

"Well I'm a third-generation musician. My Grandfather's a musician and my father and mother were both musicians and so I'm a musician. It was just natural that I should be a musician 'cause I was born into the family"

Sam Rivers, Musician

"My children, as long as you live, the shadow of the Hiss Case will brush you. In every pair of eyes that rests on you, you will see pass, like a cloud passing behind a woods in winter, the memory of your father - dissembled in friendly eyes, lurking in unfriendly eyes"

Whittaker Chambers, Writer

"More by example than by word, my father taught me logical reasoning, compassion, love of others, honesty, and discipline applied with understanding"

Paul D. Boyer, Scientist

"Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home"

Victoria Secunda

"My father was a very unhappy person, very sarcastic, and my mother was very nervous and worried about what people thought. They weren't monsters, but it wasn't a good childhood"

Paula Danziger, Author

"I didn't expect to be doing a whole bunch of Amber Browns. And because it was just one book, and the father had moved away, I didn't realize I was going to have to deal more with shared custody, divorce and all those issues"

Paula Danziger, Author

"My father being in the movie business, I thought being an actor would be great. But when I started singing to people in coffeehouses, you know, singing folk music and then, later, singing songs that I started to write myself, I felt more than an affinity for it"

David Crosby, Musician

"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"

Carol Ann Duffy, Poet

"My father was gone when I was three years old"

Marc Wallice, Actor

"It now costs more to amuse a child than it once did to educate his father"

Vaughn Monroe, Musician

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