The worst misfortune that can happen to an ordinary man is to have an extraordinary father.
My wife - to-be and I went to see my father. Only he could answer the two questions before us: Shall we get married now? Shall I begin the practice of law, or continue being the successful wine salesman I had become, working my way through law school?
When I was a teenager, my father went bust. He could have declared himself bankrupt, but he was an honourable man and he insisted on paying back all his debts. That almost ruined the family. I was aware that my mother and father couldn't control things anymore. I guess I was afraid that we would end up on the street.
If I'm going for advice for anything in my life, I go straight to my father because he has the answers.
A father's disappointment can be a very powerful tool.
I have a lot of my mother in me, but I was just born with the same parts as my father. I don't sound like him. I mean, I can do an impression of him right now, and I do not sound like him. I sound like me. My sense of rhythm I learned from my mother. My melodies, I think sometimes, I get from my mother.
My father always wanted me to play a musical instrument, and I never had that type of skill.
There was a scene in 'Qubool Hai' where Asad shoots his father. After shooting for it, I was drained completely. At times, my character's mood gets very depressing. Post shoot, it takes a good half hour to get out of character, to leave Asad behind.
My older sister was at the cusp of new wave, and I had older brothers from my father's first marriage who were rock 'n' roll guys, so I was exposed to a lot of popular culture.
I know who I am as a person, as a father, and as a husband.
I think a young woman's relationship with her father is really important.
In the '60s, my father, Wally Amos, had been a talent agent and a personal manager before taking a major career detour in 1975, when he opened a store selling chocolate chip cookies.
It's sometimes better to have a father figure to rebel against than nothing, than just a black hole or an absence.
If I go to a reunion in east Texas, my mother's side or my father's, one out of ten is a preacher or a teacher. That's just the way it is in my family.
Therefore let men withdraw themselves from errors; and laying aside corrupt superstitions, let them acknowledge their Father and Lord, whose excellence cannot be estimated, nor His greatness perceived, nor His beginning comprehended.
My father was champion of North Africa and he beat the European champ. He was very good, a professional for 12 years. We're from a big family of boxers. My father has seven brothers.
I am not ashamed to say that no man I ever met was my father's equal, and I never loved any other man as much.
I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.
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.
My father had kicked me out of his house at the height of an argument over an opinion difference. He had become so enraged. He told me never to come back, and that was all the severance it took.
To a father, when a child dies, the future dies; to a child when a parent dies, the past dies.
I look at my father, who was in many ways an unhappy person, but who, not long before he got sick, said that the greatest source of satisfaction in his life had been going to work in the company of other workers.
My father was a schoolteacher and my mother came from a teacher's family.
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 father loved music. He loved Motown and R&B, and my mother loved Journey and Fleetwood Mac, so they were always listening to it and playing it.
Male athletes don't get dropped when they father kids.
I think people instinctively know that their job is to give service and that they are part of a community. It had a great impact on me when my father walked the picket lines and I walked with him during the civil rights movement.
Again, I was influenced by my father, who was very much an atheist and took pride in combating the traditional or orthodox forms of Judaism, which his parents and which my mother's parents were very steeped in.
I always knew I wanted to make my own way; I never wanted to be dependent on my father.
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.
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.
All of the most important lessons about writing I learned from my father. He never set out to teach me anything, it would just be something he said casually in conversation.
My father loved people, children and pets.
My father's father came from Russia; my mother came from Romania.
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.
It is impossible to please all the world and one's father.
