Lauren Bacall Quotes

If I were like your mother, I would be a woman.

Women and men grow up with both sexes. Our mothers and fathers mean a lot to us, so it's just a question of finding a balance between their influences. I've found mine. And it tends to be more on the male side. I mean male side the way we understand it in the West.

I was supposed to be a mother like my mother, who didn't work.

My mom had a job, and she also took care of us, and she also took care of Dad - I always saw her pulling triple duty, doing more than I ever felt like she needed to. I made a promise to myself that it would be more of a team effort in my family someday. And because of that, I became more independent.

Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.

My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.

I'm used to very strong women because my mother was particularly strong, and my father was away all the time. My mother was a big part of bringing up three boys, so I was fully versed in the strength of a powerful woman, and accepted that as the status quo.

The thing about dads is, even when they're very good, they don't do anything like as much as most mums do.

Men are what their mothers made them.

My father wants me to be like my brother, but I can't be.

When you are born into a family like mine, you don't really know anything else. But you quickly realise that it's more about other people and how they are dealing with it. Some can be hugely in awe or uncomfortable, but to you, your parents are just your parents.

Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

For me it was a normality having a father who was a world champion. I grew up with that, so it was never extra pressure. And I've never felt the need to emerge from his shadow.

I don't imagine my parents are too excited about my kind of life. The surrounding weirdness bothers them. Still, I think they're pretty good. Their lives are based on what their friends think, just like ours are.

I had a beautiful mother and a famous father, and I didn't know where I fit in.

Mothers unconsciously allow more latitude to sons, and open encouragement, and with daughters they treat them as they would treat themselves.

You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.

How strange, when your father's wearing women's clothes and platform shoes, that a pair of loafers looks incredible.

We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook?

I think that parents grow up with an idea of what they want their kids to be like - and then their kids grow up to be people of themselves, of their own.

I did want a boy child because I had this romantic idea that a boy child when he's 16 takes his mother out for dinner.

My dad was not happy about my not becoming an architect like him.

I think that even though my father wasn't there, in his death and in his memory, he has been a mentor to me in my manhood because my mom couldn't teach me how to be a man.

My mother was a domestic goddess and Mother Earth figure. She was sweet and placid - just what the perfect wife was supposed to be and I was determined not to be.