I think in the case of my father, in terms of the things that influenced me, he never pressed me to go into academics or pressed me to go to a field, and indeed, my behavior was largely to move as far the other direction. I don't think that's uncommon with people with very successful parents.
My mother was American, and my father was from the Caribbean, and there was a big open door into the world of humanity and music.
The 'New Testament', now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.
I think a father is important for everyone. If you don't have, then maybe not so much. In the world today, it's possible that you grow up with only one parent in the family.
I was a dancer, and my father was a dancer, so I really grew up in that environment.
As a father, I've tried to encourage my children to have a broader and deeper emotional life than I've had. I want my sons to be able to express their feelings about things.
My parents, Mary Agnes Smith and Rowland Smith, both had to work since their early teens, she in the holiday boarding house of her mother and he in his father's market garden in Marton Moss, a village on the south side of Blackpool, just north of Saint Anne's-on-Sea.
I do not think that I am a natural born mother... If I ever wanted to mother anyone, it was my father.
My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it.
I never really told my parents that I wanted to be a pop star or anything. They just knew that I was totally obsessed with music. Funnily enough, my father always used to say that he didn't think I could sing.
In 2001, my father finally succumbed to the bone cancer that had tortured him for seven years. His last weeks were a terrible, black icing on the cake, the agony, the slow twisting, thinning and snapping of his skeleton. Everything fell apart.
If men would as fervently seek after love and righteousness as they do after opinions, there would be no strife on earth, and we should be as children of one father, and should need no law or ordinance. For God is not served by any law, but only by obedience.
We need a father to rage against.
Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.
I had a critical father. I'm more like my father. He was a sales rep for pharmaceutical companies.
I've always loved Spanish. I love my father's Spanish records.
My mother and father were visionaries in Pittsburgh, part of that collective of people who were creative and active together, and I am a product of that community and those relationships.
My grandfather was a Pullman porter, and my father put his way through college by cleaning floors at night in the libraries. I understand that working people are in some way the bedrock of my existence and the existence of many people here.
My father did everything for me. He was awesome.
My father required me to honor my father and my mother too much to put up games on them. I did on occasion.
My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels.
My father was Presbyterian.
My father was very energetic; my mother was very energetic. He lived to a very old age, and so did my mother. I believe that I just have it from my father, from my parents. They had wonderful energy.
I grew up in a secular environment, you know, in the '60s and '70s. My mother's family was Catholic, but you know, just very kind of conventionally Catholic. You know, nothing - there was nothing, you know, extreme about their version of religion. And my father was a free spirit, you know? He had no time for religion at all.
My mother and father were partisan national heroes: I learned sacrifice and discipline from them and that a private life is not as important as the message you want to leave.
I've always been quite driven. I take after my father.
I knew Sinatra for 38 years. He was like my father. Frank Sinatra was my 'dad.' He treated me like his son. He gave me the best advice about singing, about this and that... He was a very sensitive man, very astute, one of the sharpest men that I ever met in my life.
I've always had trouble with male authority figures because my father was such a martinet.
When I was young, before school, my father would wake me up and we would go running together. A love of being physical, being active and being outside was something he instilled in me.
My father died in '97. But at least he lived until 93, so he saw my success.
When I started, with films like 'The Bay Boy' and 'Stand by Me', I look back on those interviews and I'm amazed; there's no mention of my father; it's not even 'son of Donald Sutherland.' I caught a bit of a break in that it never felt like a weight to me.
My father's music is all I remember from my childhood.
Mum and Dad split up when I was nine. We upped and moved from London to Sussex, and suddenly I went from an urban life to nothing in the countryside - with a new father and new life.
On my father's side, I'm descended from immigrants, one of whom was a Syrian refugee from the Armenian genocide, and my mother was an immigrant from Germany whose visa had expired and, for a year and change, was undocumented here in the U.S.
My father died the year I was elected to Congress: 1987.
My own interest in art was because of my mother. My father didn't like contemporary art, so he didn't give her large sums to spend. So, she began buying prints and drawings. During my school days, I remember sitting in on many of the early meetings.
