All Quotes

My father was a coal hewer from Goldthorpe, a coal-mining village in South Yorkshire. He played for the Yorkshire second team as an opening fast bowler - to me he was a gorgeously heroic man. He helped form a union and closed down the Barnsley seam because it was seeping gas, and saved many, many lives.
‐‐ Brian Blessed

My father was a construction engineer, and my mother was a production engineer.
‐‐ Mikhail Khodorkovsky

My father was a construction worker most of his life. My mother, when she came from Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, to the United States, never had a chance to go to college either and became a clerical worker. But they did nothing but build this country.
‐‐ Xavier Becerra

My father was a CPA. He worked hard in the aircraft industry, and would come home more and more infrequently. He was about to leave my mother, which he did when I was 15.
‐‐ Jeremy Irons

My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.
‐‐ Seamus Heaney

My father was a dark-skinned brother, but my mother was a very fair-skinned lady. From what I understand, she was Creole; we think her people originally came from New Orleans. She looked almost like a white woman, which meant she could pass - as folks used to say back then. Her hair was jet-black. She was slim and very attractive.
‐‐ Ice T

My father was a die maker for 39 years, so I had a basic understanding of the automobile industry and what the manufacturing world was like, just from the opportunity to spend time with him - just talking, because he was a car buff.
‐‐ Mary Barra

My father was a diplomatic officer. As a diplomat's daughter, you have to learn to present yourself very early on.
‐‐ Kathleen Turner

My father was a director and producer, so when I was a little kid, he would take me to movies and show me what's good and what's not good and why, and often that would take me to a conversation about directing.
‐‐ Jason Bateman

My father was a doctor.
‐‐ David Alan Grier

My father was a doctor, an army cardiologist.
‐‐ Deepak Chopra

My father was a doctor, and I admired him and got along well with him. He took me with him on house calls. We were living in Flushing, which was then a sleepy village of 25,000 - before the subway got there. I've been sure I wanted to be a doctor since I was about 12.
‐‐ Lewis Thomas

My father was a doctor, but he was what I would call an intellectual - very well-read and very interested in knowledge. He insisted that I get as much education as my brothers.
‐‐ Shirin Neshat

My father was a doctor in Moravia, in the south of the country. There were a number of Jewish doctors in the hospital there, and at a certain point - almost too late, really, but in time - they were all sent overseas by their employer.
‐‐ Tom Stoppard

My father was a dreamer - my hero. He was a smart, tough guy from Poland, a cutter of lady's handbags, an old socialist-unionist who always considered himself a failure. His big line was: 'Don't end up like me.'
‐‐ Alan King

My father was a dreamy fellow - he read Plato and Socrates and watched Phillies games.
‐‐ Patti Smith

My father was a drill sergeant, and I've always had that mentality drilled into me of 'you've got to do better, you've got to do better.' I just try to listen to the characters. That's what works for me.
‐‐ Sherrilyn Kenyon

My father was a factory worker, and we were really poor. But everything I earned peddling papers and working in stores, he made me put aside for education.
‐‐ Abraham A. Ribicoff

My father was a farmer and my mother was a farmer, but, my childhood was very good. I am very grateful for my childhood, because it was full of gladness and good humanity.
‐‐ Roberto Benigni

My father was a fighter pilot, so I moved around the world when I was young. Then I ended up in Kansas. I'd just sort of gravitated toward the arts, and I had always loved music and really loved theater even though I didn't want to act.
‐‐ Patty Jenkins

My father was a food lover and a deadbeat dad, and maybe a connection between good food and bad dads was forged early, in the deepest folds of my subconscious, where we make so many decisions about our parents.
‐‐ J. R. Moehringer

My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
‐‐ Kai Bird

My father was a freelance writer/director/producer, and my mother was a stewardess for Pan-Am. It was very non-traditional.
‐‐ Jason Bateman

My father was a general manager with Hyatt, so we lived in the hotel so he would be close by if there were any problems. My mum was always adamant about us not abusing it. So I still had to clean my room. Housekeeping would never come and do it.
‐‐ Dianna Agron

My father was a golden boy from a very small town. He won a very prestigious law scholarship to NYU Law School, and there in Greenwich Village, he met my mother, who was very young, fresh off the boat from Germany.
‐‐ Blake Bailey

My father was a good man, but he was a con man. He was a wanderer, nomadic.
‐‐ Danny Aiello

My father was a good preacher and had a little bit of drama.
‐‐ Jayne Meadows

My father was a GP; my mother was a teacher and amateur actress. My father was a bit of a storyteller, but the acting influence must have been from her - yes, put it down to my mother.
‐‐ Ciaran Hinds

My father was a graduate student at Oxford in the early 1960s, where the conventions and etiquette of clothing were crucial to the pervasive class consciousness of the place and time.
‐‐ Russell Smith

My father was a great example of a strong and good man and Christian man, and my mother taught all my six sisters how to be young ladies and mothers and how to take care of your family. And so I think they were - they still are - great examples for all of us to their kids and to the world, too.
‐‐ Magic Johnson

My father was a great innovator in public life, but when it came to raising his daughters, no one could have been more conservative.
‐‐ Rose Kennedy

My father was a great inspiration, and there was a bit of competition between us. He'd work in his studio, and I'd work in my space, but the door was always half open.
‐‐ Jamie Wyeth

My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha'am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha'am's essays.
‐‐ Noam Chomsky

My father was a gruff Irishman who was unable to express feelings and always insisted we be tough. Being a parent, for me, means creating what I didn't have. I want my children to feel love and be able to express it.
‐‐ Mike Farrell

My father was a guitar player, and I was raised with a super high standard of what good guitar playing was.
‐‐ Billy Corgan

My father was a guy who, because of the businesses he was in - the hotel business, the hospitality business - he didn't differentiate between the waiter serving you dinner, from the maitre d from the guy who owns a restaurant. Everybody was the same to him. He didn't look at who you were. He didn't look at your wallet.
‐‐ Steve Tisch

My father was a ham radio geek, and I remember the glow of the vacuum tubes from a Hammarlund receiver that became a hand-me-down to me.
‐‐ Bre Pettis

My father was a headmaster in England and then the dean of a college in Australia. We moved there when I was about five, so my education was in Australia, and I always felt I was Australian even though my passport was British.
‐‐ Olivia Newton-John

My father was a huge influence on me.
‐‐ Carol Leifer

My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.
‐‐ Richard Flanagan

My father was a jazz tenor sax player. He played in a lot of big bands. So I had that sound around me all the time. The first record that really caught my ear was Clifford Brown's 'Brownie Eyes.' I grew up listening to John Coltrane and Illinois Jacquet. This is where I come from... I love improvisational music.
‐‐ Meshell Ndegeocello

My father was a Jewish immigrant who settled in Argentina and was left to his own devices at the age of 15. My mother was a teacher, herself the daughter of a poor immigrant family.
‐‐ Cesar Milstein

My father was a journalist.
‐‐ Daniel Snyder

My father was a journalist for 50 years in Leeds and Fleet Street. I thought about a career in business to show I could do something different, but the reaction among prospective employers was, shall we say, underwhelming.
‐‐ Lionel Barber

My father was a joyous, joyous spirit, he really was. He was a hedonist, that was just - he enjoyed life, thrust up to the elbows with it. He was a terrible father. I don't know that he was parented that well.
‐‐ Carrie Fisher

My father was a lawyer.
‐‐ Pat Robertson

My father was a lawyer and to my best knowledge nobody in my family before had interest in science.
‐‐ George Andrew Olah

My father was a legendary copywriter. He wrote 'Timex Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking.' He named Earth Day 'Earth Day.' It falls on his birthday, April 22. Earth Day, birthday. So the idea came easily.
‐‐ Sarah Koenig

My father was a lesson. He had his own bakery, and it was closed one day a week, but he would go anyway. He did it because he really loved his bakery. It wasn't a job.
‐‐ Christopher Walken