David LaChapelle Quotes

Environment is a sculptor - a painter. If we had been born in Constantinople, then most of us would have said: 'There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.' If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana. As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them.

My mother was French Protestant, and my father was Italian Catholic, and their union was an excess of God, guilt and sauce.

My mom's a Catholic, and my dad's a Jew, and they didn't want anything to do with anything.

I grew up in Cazenovia, N.Y. I'm the second of five children, with three sisters and a brother.

I'm from a family with five kids in it, and my father almost became a Catholic priest. And my mother never went to church, but she's the best Christian I know. My siblings have all chosen different paths to or away from their spirituality.

In my family, we were on again off again Unitarians, partly because my father, raised Roman Catholic, had had enough of church.

My father was Catholic, my mother was Protestant, and because of that I got Christened in both churches, so I've got all these names... but my Dad always called me Mick.

No Catholics in my family.

I grew up Catholic. My mother is from El Salvador, so my family on her side is Roman Catholic. My father is Protestant, and while he was spiritual, he wasn't much of a churchgoing person. I think it's fairly common for families to be brought up in the mother's religion.

My mother was sort of mildly religious, but the rest of us, you know, we didn't really have it forced on us.

As a kid, you're starting to grow up and want more freedoms. But if you have people who are absorbing and adopting religious principles and teachings, they start drawing these lines and creating confines in their life to live within certain lines.

My mom's Jewish and my dad's Irish Catholic alcoholic, so I whine on the inside.

I grew up in this Southern Baptist atmosphere, and my mother and father were both, I guess you would say, academics. They were both teachers.

My mother converted when I was 16. She was the driving force behind religion in our family. So, I'm sure I was heavily influenced by that. But, I also was, and still am, convinced by the Catholic churches historical claims to represent the continuity with the early Church that other forms of Western Christianity lack.

My mother's people, the people who captured my imagination when I was growing up, were of the Deep South - emotional, changeable, touched with charisma and given to histrionic flourishes. They were courageous under tension and unexpectedly tough beneath their wild eccentricities, for they had and unusually close working agreement with God. They also had an unusually high quota of bullshit.

I was growing up in the suburbs; I was one of eight kids. So I did have a community when I was younger, but all of my brothers and sisters were older.

I was born into a Catholic family. I grew up in West Belfast. Faith was very important to us eight children and my mother and father. It was grounded in the Christian tradition of social involvement.

I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family, there's lots of children, seven brothers, two sisters grew up together, fighting with each other, went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family.

I always felt the Jewish part more. In fact, growing up I felt like a Jew among WASPs. My brother is more decidedly Waspy.

When asked if I consider myself Buddhist, the answer is, Not really. But it's more my religion than any other because I was brought up with it in an intellectual and spiritual environment. I don't practice or preach it, however. But Buddhism has had a major effect on who I am and how I think about the world. What I have learned is that I like all religions, but only parts of them.

I like the fact that people come together who have shared values, but I don't believe that a man died 2,000 years ago and was crucified on a cross to save me from my original sin.

If my parents hadn't been made to do that from living in the Bible Belt, maybe it wouldn't be something that matters to me - maybe I wouldn't even know how to talk to God.

All religions do not point to God

I credit my parents for many things that had never seemed remarkable when I was growing up, and one of those things is how nonthreatened they were by my constant search for backup parents - other mothers and fathers would have bristled at this, but they never did. So I was always looking for other parental stand-ins, and I always found them.

I grew up in a Catholic family in the Midwest. And I knew people of different faiths and people that were atheists and people that were agnostic.