Ira Levin Quotes

I didn't actually get along with my dad when I was growing up, so by the time I was in my 20s, I didn't think I was going to be a writer.

Sibling relationships are complicated. All family relationships are. Look at Hamlet.

If you're lucky like me, your relationship with your brother has resolved itself on the peaceful side of the fence and has stayed there. But if you're someone who's got a family that's all fractured and finding it hard to relate, that's a very sad place to be.

My relationships with both my mother and father are good. We spent several difficult years hashing over the problems and the past, and worked out a fairly solid middle ground. I wouldn't say my relationship with either of them - they're no longer together - is exactly typical, but that would be difficult after all we went through.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

I'm working on my relationship with my mother and father, but my upbringing has been very destructive.

I had lost relationships with my dad, my brother and sister and I was just like, you know what, this is definitely the time to just get it together and so that's what I did.

I can understand a family that's imploding. I have experience of that in my own life.

The Trees was four complete nuts. We didn't have a damn thing in common except insanity. So we fought a lot. And we had two brothers - who fought like brothers.

I didn't know if I would ever reconcile with my family, and I needed to believe that I could forgive, regardless.

My relationship with my mom has really evolved since The Hills. We had a very hard time getting through that, and I didn't talk to her for almost two years, but since then we have learned to get over the past and move forward.

My father is the reason I am the way I am today. He's why I acted up and he's why I prayed to be the opposite of him. We made up before he died but I vowed to never raise my kids like how he raised me.

I was so determined not to pass on to my children what I perceived to be the faults of my upbringing.

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.

My father and I have a very good relationship. We always got along. But I always scold him.

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

I love my wife... but sometimes not so much. Frustration and fights can muck up a good thing. And just when a thing can move past differences and into the realm of peace and prosperity, another thing - an old idea or new interpretation or any spark that relights the paradigms that comfort us - will keep us where we are, where it is safe.

Over the years, things got so bad between my mother and I, we stopped talking to each other and started communicating by putting Ann Landers articles on the refrigerator.

A lot of times, you try and please your biological family, and you can't please them.

It is hard to tell your mother to change her life.

I grew up in a single-wide, three-bedroom mobile home with my family. And now I see them, like, half a dozen times a year. Figuring out how to come home and talk to them again and feel like myself has probably been the greatest challenge.

I hated Chris, my brother. I would pull his hair and kick him, until one day my father gave him permission to fight back. I'll be apologizing to him for the rest of my life.

The fact I had my father as an adversary was such a powerful tool to work with. I subconsciously fought him to the degree that I drove me to be one of the most successful musician in the world.

I guess in America we're so sold on this ideal of the perfect, well-adjusted family that is able to confront any conflict and, with true love and understanding, work things through. I'm sure they do exist, but I never knew any of them.

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.