My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, 'You're tearing up the grass'; 'We're not raising grass,' Dad would reply. 'We're raising boys.'
As a little girl I used to daydream about my real father coming on a white horse to rescue me.
Because I'm a big guy, I was always playing the bad guy or whatever, but after I did 'The Blind Side,' where I played a father who's a really loving, likeable sort of person, a lot of those barriers were broken down. People saw me as something softer, not so much as a heavy anymore.
I had to steel myself against this psychic devastation - to see your father on the street. It's hard enough to pick up somebody you don't know from the streets, and then to actually have other people pick your father up - it was psychically devastating.
Balance in general is difficult, but I refuse to go through life and just have work and not have good balance. I want to be an example, not only to my own children but also to artists and other entrepreneurs, that you can be a workaholic and also be a good husband and good father.
My father's family can be traced back to 1400. I've been told by gypsies that there is unmistakeably gypsy blood in me. Lee is a gypsy name, you know.
My great-grandfather was a kola nut trader and the richest man in West Africa at the time of his death. My father was a businessman and politician. I was actually raised by my grandfather.
I was everything, patriarch, priest, father and judge.
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.
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.
My father carries around the picture of the kid who came with his wallet.
In my mind, I always knew what my father looked like.
My father had all kinds of instruments in the house that he would hide from my mother. He bought them through mail order!
It's disgusting, but my father taught me when your mouth gets dry, just suck the sweat out of your own jersey. There's no bravado to any of it; it's just a disgusting little trick.
Initially I had intended to study medicine, but before going to University I had decided that I would be better suited to a career in which I could concentrate my activities and interests more on a single goal than appeared to be possible in my father's profession.
As a kid, I'd get up at 3 in the morning during school vacations to help my father on his bakery-truck route. He didn't get a vacation from that schedule.
My father, his values were anchored in the time, but they were also timeless, whether it's bilingualism, multiculturalism or the charter of rights and freedoms.
I went to visit my father to tell him that I was going to go to college and become an architect - that was my dream. I was like, yeah I graduated from school, but it's not like you showed up for that. But all he was worried about is whether or not I wanted money from him.
My father was one of the fortunate wartime servicemen: he made a full recovery from his injuries, was promoted to captain, survived the war, had a satisfying career as a colonial officer and, eventually, died in February 2002, a month before his 85th birthday.
We're not at a point in time to be taking chances with children and young people in the church. The Holy Father himself said... there is no room in the priesthood or religious life for someone who has abused a child. I think he's right.
I want to be the one to make a change, like when my father started his music. It's about the message. Coffee is a vehicle to create change.
Conversion is a very, very important part of what you are doing. We will have a responsibility to report to Heavenly Father regarding those we bring into the Church.
My father raised us to step toward trouble rather than to step away from it.
I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language, and my father spoke it to us.
If I did not have for him the warm affection a son feels toward a less austere and preoccupied father, I at least had an immense respect for him, and a great admiration.
My mother's family is Christian: her father was a Baptist lay preacher, and her brother, in a leap of Anglican upward mobility, became a vicar in the Church of Wales. But my mother converted to Islam on marrying my father. She was not obliged to; Muslim men are free to marry ahl al-kitab, or people of the Book - among them, Jews and Christians.
On my mother's side, I come from Midlands engineers and, on my father's, from tenant farmers near Oxford.
In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night.
There will always be competition, especially in showbiz. There's always someone younger and hungrier standing behind you; there's always someone with more contacts; there's always someone whose grandfather or father is a filmmaker. I think your job is just to be there 100% - you work hard, and there are no shortcuts to success.
The process was remarkably cathartic. I'd sit and listen to my father's voice - having not heard some of these tapes for 30 years and hearing his voice laying me down for a nap, our giggles and cooking dinner - and I remembered all those wonderful days. Normal days.
I was 12 when my father passed, so I didn't have a father during my teenage years.
Just like if you were brought up on a farm, you would most likely carry on your father's business as a farmer; I was brought up in the kitchen and ended up becoming a chef.
The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.
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 made sure of discipline, but my mum, she was serious business.
Although there is no solution that is easy, and there is no one formula that will work for everyone with a heartache or a concern, there is One who cares very much about your situation, and He knows what you should do. That is our Father in Heaven.