"I always loved my mother, felt loved, but she was judgmental. Her father in Ireland didn't approve of women generally, and she took on his values. She believed her own mother was foolish"
"My father being an outdoors person, he used to take us on quite a few adventures thorugh the wild areas down there, introducing us to alligators and rattlesnakes and all the trees and plants"
"Music was around in my family in two ways. My mother would occasionally sing to me, but I was mostly stimulated by the classical music my father had left behind. I had an ear for music, I suppose, so that's what began my interest in music"
"As a father and grandfather, I have witnessed firsthand the joy of new life entering the world. I know the pain and apprehension that goes along with premature births and birth defects"
"My father described this tall lady who stands in the middle of the New York harbor, holding high a torch to welcome people seeking freedom in America. I instantly fell in love"
"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"
"I always sang when I was little and my father, who was a great influence on me, also had a wonderful voice. He and my mother really encouraged me to sing and play the piano. They were always very supportive"
"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 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"
"I would say my greatest achievement in life right now - my greatest achievement period is - and I'm still trying to achieve it - is to be a wonderful father to my kids"
"I will begin first to search out this right by that magna charta, that great and faithful charter which was made to Abraham, the father of the faithful, in the name of all his seed"
"My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur"
"If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time"
"My first name - I have no middle name - was chosen by my father, as he told me, on that solitary walk in the forested hills. He selected it from a verse of the seventh chapter of Isaiah; there was no Immanuel among our ancestors known to him"
"A good father believes that he does wisely to encourage enterprise, productive skill, prudent self-denial, and judicious expenditure on the part of his son"
"My father was a police officer before he retired. One of my brothers is also a police officer, and I think they kind of expected I would do something along those lines, like become a fireman or something"
"No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him"
"It was not always easy because I was always an individual and found it difficult to be one of a group. One person who was very supportive was my father. My mother was great but my father really recognised my individuality and supported me in that"
"My mother was born in your state, Mr. Walter, and my mother was a Quaker, and my ancestors in the time of Washington baked bread for George Washington's troops when they crossed the Delaware, and my own father was a slave"
