I’m an only child.

Occasionally I’ve seen children become heavy-handed and insensitive when dealing with their aging parents, and it only caused resentment and hard feelings.

I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father.

I have always marched to my own beat, and most frequently, it was inconsistent not only with my own immediate family, but with my culture as well.

A lot of preachers‘ kids are some of the most rebellious kids in the world. I never was like that.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable. As a result, the atmosphere of our home was super-charged with fear because you never knew if what you did would make him mad or not.

Your children will see what you’re all about by what you live rather than what you say.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

Me and my dad are friends. We’re cool. I’ll never be disappointed again, because I don’t expect anything anymore from him. I just let him exist, and that’s how we get along.

Do you know what you call those who use towels and never wash them, eat meals and never do the dishes, sit in rooms they never clean, and are entertained till they drop? If you have just answered, ‚A house guest,‘ you’re wrong because I have just described my kids.

I don’t think that much about my relationship with my mother and what it did to me. I sometimes feel terrible regret about her, what her life must have been like. Often, when I’m enjoying something, I think of how meager her rewards were and how much courage, in a way, she needed to go on living.

I always wanted to do what my brothers were doing. I always wanted to play the games they played and play rough and wear pants and go outside.

I want my kids to see me as Dad, for God’s sake, not a television personality.

I was an only child, and Mother was always right with me all my life. I used to get very angry at her when I was growing up-it’s a natural thing.

I don’t think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib.

There’s a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I’m affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn’t want to leave. He likes it very much.

I’ve felt like an outsider all my life. It comes from my mother, who always felt like an outsider in my father’s family. She was a powerful woman, and she motivated my father.

My fans saw me get engaged, saw me make that woman my wife, me having kids, me divorcing, me talking about divorce before the divorce, me talking about my kids‘ reaction to that divorce.

It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.

When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child… eventually.

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.

Men are what their mothers made them.

My own eight children all march to the beat of their inner music, and in some cases, it is definitely far away from what I hear. I’ve had to honor their instincts and their choices, and merely guided them out of harm’s way until they could be their own guides.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

I was raised in a family where vulnerability was barely tolerated: no training wheels on our bicycles, no goggles in the pool, just get it done. And so I grew up not only with discomfort about my own vulnerability, I didn’t care for it in other people either.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

Like all best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.

I have to be in tune. All the time. I have to be in tune with my husband, where he is, how he’s feeling. I have to be in tune with where my family is.

As a father, I always want my son to be perfect. When he was young, I tried to train him in martial arts, but he said, ‚I don’t want to become like Bruce Lee’s son, with everybody telling me how good my father was.‘ I just think my son is too lazy.

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.

I’m not great at bedtime stories. Bedtime stories are supposed to put the kid to sleep. My kid gets riled up and then my wife has to come in and go, ‚All right! Get out of the room.‘

We were never intimate mother and children while she was our mother – but… when she became our child, the affection came.

It’s very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can’t imagine.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable.

With the amount of money I have, it’s difficult raising children the way I was raised.

When I was young, my brother David and I were farmed off to foster homes, and I spent time in orphanages. My father abandoned us. Here’s the most important person in my life, and I never met him.

It’s much worse to read criticism about your son than yourself.

I was brought up as an only child, and we were very close. But when I was 14, we got evicted. We came home to a padlock, and I looked up at my mom and she was crying, and there was nothing to do.

A child who is allowed to be disrespectful to his parents will not have true respect for anyone.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.

My mother never made me do anything for my brothers, like serve them. I think that’s an important lesson, especially for the Latino culture, because the women are expected to be the ones that serve and cook and whatever. Not in our family. Everybody was equal.

My daughter doesn’t even get my humor. She’s like, ‚Um, no. I don’t get it, Dad. Mmm, no, not that one, Dad.‘

We do not want the men of another color for our brothers-in-law, but we do want them for our brothers.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

My daughter has impressions that she does of me.

I praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course.

I got a lot of support from my parents. That’s the one thing I always appreciated. They didn’t tell me I was being stupid; they told me I was being funny.

To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn’t be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife.

My mother was a professional sick person; she took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It’s just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember she’s the daughter of alcoholics who’d leave her alone at Christmas time.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

When you’re around the kids, you feel like you act the most grown up just because you’re supposed to lead. I say things, like every other parent, that reminds you of your own parents. One thing I do know about being a parent, you understand why your father was in a bad mood a lot.

My mother was a powerful influence. She made me toe the line. If I didn’t have a perfect report card, she showed her disappointment.

I grew up upper-class. Private school. My dad had a Jaguar. We’re African-American, and we work together as a family, so people assume we’re like the Jacksons. But I didn’t have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.

My dad was never married. He was kind of a rolling stone. But he was never disrespectful. At the same time, even though he had women in his life when I was a kid, there wasn’t any consistency.

It’s true that I’ve never had a burning desire to rebel against my parents.