Alafair Burke Quotes

Everybody has some dysfunction in their families.

Families just have so many secrets and dysfunctions.

I grew up on Edgar Allen Poe, and I loved Alfred Hitchcock's movies.

Many of us live in dysfunctional families, and so even if it's in a fairy tale, or perhaps because it's in a fairy tale, we have a chance to look at that side of our reflected lives differently.

My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.

I think being raised by a single mother put me on the outside, and I would watch my mother's married friends and think, 'Why does she put him down in public?' or, 'Why is he so rude to her?' It seemed to me that there were very few marriages where the couple were genuinely in a supportive, loving partnership.

My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.

'Fall on Your Knees' is really a story about secrets and family, and the idea that there are some stories or truths that need to be expressed.

Families, generally, suck. And I say that as someone who, like my husband, had parents who proved the proverbial exception to the rule.

I don't believe in happy families.

The big dramas that fascinate me are the quiet ones that happen behind closed doors in so-called ordinary families.

Every family is dysfunctional, whether you want to admit it or not.

I think most families have a few secrets or some strange aspect to their history. We're all fascinated by family dynamics, but I'd much rather sit in an audience and watch someone else's problems!

There's a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody's family. We all pretend to outsiders that it's not so, but behind locked doors, there are usually high emotions running.

My parents would, like, argue in front of us and it wasn't a big deal, whereas I know some people's parents who, if they argued, it was like, 'Oh, my God.'

I grew up in suburbia, so it's a world I'm familiar with... but in my experience, all the families that I grew up thinking were the perfect families who kept it together... all their secrets would come out, and it'd be something dark and disgusting beneath the surface, so I wanted to exploit that.

A betrayal in a family is much more devastating than a betrayal among friends, or even lovers.

Mary Trump's 'Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man' tells a remarkable story, the broad strokes of which many already knew. Mary Trump offers a tale of what she calls 'malignant' family dysfunction, and how it produced a malignantly dysfunctional president.

My family's messed up, for real.

In families there are frequently matters of which no one speaks, nor even alludes. There are no words for these matters. As the binding skeleton beneath the flesh is never acknowledged by us and, when at last it defines itself, is after all an obscenity.

I became a reader - never mind a writer - because of Stephen King.

Violence was very much a part of my mother's upbringing - a little less so with my father's, but my father was an angry man when he was young. He was angry and frustrated and had no idea how to channel anger.

I don't think a camera and a cameraman can destroy a family.

Jeff Garlin is essentially my dad.

I think that, any young child or teenager, you take a lot from your parents when you're growing up.