I come from Detroit where it’s rough and I’m not a smooth talker.

Train up a child in the way that he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

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.

I grew up cursing a lot.

My mother raised me with God. We were poor financially, but we were rich spiritually.

My dad had a church of 90 people when I was born. It was just, over the years it continued to grow.

My mother was Catholic, my father was Protestant. There was always a debate going on at home – I think in those days we called them arguments – about who was right and who was wrong.

I live in Hollywood, but you can’t make me love Hollywood. I’ll never love Hollywood.

I was not raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of.

You see some of the weirdest people in Detroit casinos.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

I didn’t have a father figure in the house.

All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race – racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic – what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.

The only thing I have to go by is what my mother and father told me, how I was brought up.

I like the city. I like the concrete. I like big business. I like being a CEO of my own company and having a lot of responsibilities. At the same time, when I can go off with a backpack or off on a surfboard or even off on a run somewhere in the woods – that’s where I’m really happy.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

I grew up in San Francisco. And so I’m informed in a certain kind of way about, you know, believing in democracy and believing in America. And I’m a very ardent patriot.

I was raised by a mother who told me I was great every day of my life.

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

I grew up around lots of men – my father, my brothers, my uncles – so I wasn’t intimidated by them.

Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.

The truth is, I’m just a rough old New Zealander who has enjoyed many challenges in his life.

I was reared in the church, in the Presbyterian Church.

My folks ain’t graduated from high school or nothing like that, so we always had to struggle in the family – and I come from a big family.

Those people in New York are not gonna change me none.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

With all the travel we’re doing to cold-weather cities, your mind definitely starts to wander. It gets you away from the game. Even when you arrive in a city, you’re tempted to just sit in your hotel and rest. Sometimes it’s nice to just get out and walk around, to see what’s there.

I realized the other day that I’ve lived in New York longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.

What I believe is that people have many modes in which they can be. When we live in cities, the one we are in most of the time is the alert mode. The ‚take control of things‘ mode, the ‚be careful, watch out‘ mode, the ‚speed‘ mode – the ‚Red Bull‘ mode, actually. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s all part of what we are.

All the learnin‘ my father paid for was a bit o‘ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

My upbringing in Canada made me the person I am. I will always be proud to be a Canadian.

I don’t believe in honors – it bothers me. Honors bother: honors is epaulettes; honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way.

When I was growing up, my family was so poor we couldn’t afford to pay attention.

I try to use my experience and the fact that I grew up in the ghetto – I tell people you don’t have to rob or steal to get out of the ghetto.

I come from a family of 12, so I kind of got a little lost as a child.

My mom is American, so I was raised in her household in my formative years.

And I come here as a daughter, raised on the South Side of Chicago – by a father who was a blue-collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me.

Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That’s something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.

The city is a body and a mind – a physical structure as well as a repository of ideas and information.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

I mean, when you grow up in the inner city and you grow up in a single-parent household, that’s – those are humbling times, you know?

I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that’s all I ever was associated with.

From when I was born to when I was 21, I never left Toronto. That’s why I’m such a city cat.

My mom is very religious – Catholic – and from a young age they brought me to the church.

For me, New York is comfortable, not strange.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

I remember coming to New York in 1974 to do a play here called ‚Equis.‘ And I remember the first morning getting up and walking around the streets, and I thought, ‚I’m home.‘ I felt really at peace here.

There are a lot of good women in New York.

One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy, but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat, and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn’t move to New York to make a fortune.

I grew up in a funny way.

I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

I have a lot of other stuff to accomplish before I get to kids. Whenever the time is right, I’ll just know. If I had a girl, she’d probably be really rebellious. She would be like a bundle of karma. I would love to bring them up in Barbados.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Oh, my mama was awesome. Very strict, overreligious, loved the Lord, loved rules. But she had to be that way because of where we were growing up, the neighborhood I was from.

My mother would kill me if I posed nude! My mother raised me with certain standards.

If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.

I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‚call attention to yourself,‘ or ‚think you were smart.‘ My mother was an exception to this rule and was punished by the early onset of Parkinson’s disease.

My parents were the same in the pulpit as they were at home. I think that’s where a lot of preachers‘ kids get off base sometimes. Because they don’t see the same things at both places.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.