It's possible to fall in love with somebody who doesn't treat us well, who makes us feel worse about ourselves, who doesn't hold the same respect for us as we do for them, or who has such a dysfunctional life themselves that they threaten to bring us down with them.
If you're getting abandonment, if you're getting abuse as a child, if you're getting uncertainty when you're a child, unfortunately you tend to look for that in your life later on, and you think that's love.
My home and my upbringing and just the problems in my family within my extended family were such that it truly was a mix of the good, bad, and the ugly.
I was a huge fan of J. Courtney Sullivan's novel 'Maine,' and like that novel, 'Saint' is a family saga set in Boston. Irish Catholic family secrets - is there anything better?
If a man's character is to be abused there's nobody like a relative to do the business.
It's crazy, right? To love someone who's hurt you? It's even crazier to think that someone who hurts you loves you.
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.
Repression is fantastic.
'Wuthering Heights' is portrayed as a great romantic novel, and when I read it again, I thought, 'How is this romantic? All these people are horrible to each other!'
'Satya' and 'Company' are two very dark and brooding relationship films; there was no hero.
When people help one another in sin and transgression, they finish by hating each other.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
If you look at American medical fiction written by doctors, like 'The House of God' by Samuel Shem and 'The Blood of Strangers' by Frank Huyler, both have themes of cynicism and dysfunction running through them that you won't find in 'ER.' You find it in 'Scrubs,' but because that's a comedy, it gets away with it.
I used to watch 'The Waltons' and sob because my family was nothing like that. We had a cruel sense of humor in my family.
I have breakups that I can credit to every song. In my twenties, I picked people who would create that dysfunction and drama, so I could draw upon it.
I believe I was a codependent out of the womb and have been struggling to free myself from its vice-like grip for many, many years.
I had a lot of trouble with my coaches. Your coaches are father figures - you look to what they say. Well, the reality of it is, they are just shmucks.
I can understand a family that's imploding. I have experience of that in my own life.
It is a harmful feeling, because it disturbs advantageous and joyous, peaceful relations with other peoples, and above all produces that governmental organization under which power may fall, and does fall, into the, hands of the worst men.
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.
I need to figure men out. I've been seeing men that either remind me of my mother or remind me of my father. I either end up caretaking or being abandoned so I've had enough of my romantic instincts. I need to date away from type.
'The Man Who Loved Children,' Christina Stead's masterpiece, remains the most fabulous book that hardly anyone I know has read.
The air transportation system consists of three components: Airports, Air Traffic Control, and airlines. The three work together like a dysfunctional family.
It's good to learn early that every show is a family - -complete with dysfunctional relationships, tough love, and plenty of occasion for forgiveness.
My father was a monster. A monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again.
