I'd rather my son died in an accident than showed up with some bloke with a moustache.
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
Dad was diagnosed with lung cancer when I was a lad. From then on, he lived in fear that death was just around the corner, and he set about programming me to work hard and bring in some cash.
I love my kids. But I don't give them the burden of being the source of my love.
I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.
To middle-class parents, the project team may have seemed unfit for children, but it was exactly what I needed.
When I was little, my parents really only wanted me to be a scientist or a doctor; they had never even heard of law school. I think even these days if you were to tell your mother you want to be a fashion designer, or an artist or a writer, a lot of Asian parents would be alarmed because they don't think that's a secure career.
I probably gave up on my dad when I was born.
As far as I was concerned, we'd come to a draw: I hadn't wanted to come, and she didn't want me to leave. We were even. But I knew my mother wouldn't see it that way. Lately, we didn't seem to see anything the same.
She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.
Scouting ought to be about building character, not about sex. Period. Precious few parents enroll their boys in the Scouts to get a crash course in sexual orientation.
I kind of - I like my life; I feel I have lots of opportunities. And my parents actually having had such high expectations for me - I would say it's the greatest gift that anyone has ever given me. I complained a lot when I was little, but that's how I feel now. And that's why I tried to do the same with my two daughters.
Young men are obsessed with their dads, and they remain obsessed if the dad is not around. Remember that there was a lot of discussion about how George W. Bush might have invaded Iraq to atone for the failures of his dad.
Every woman has a mother, and every woman will have an issue with that mother and things that mother did or didn't do. It just depends on how you choose to process the lessons that you learned from your own mother.
My relationship with my dad was a little rocky, sure. The time that I spent with him was basically two hours of Little League practice, six or seven days a week, from the age of five until whenever. If we lost, there was no talking the whole way home. But that seemed normal to me.
I had a critical father. I'm more like my father. He was a sales rep for pharmaceutical companies.
When I was seven and told my mom, 'I'm gonna be a writer,' she said, 'Oh, that's a terrible idea. You'll live in misery and die teaching other people's children badly.' My parents wanted the safer path for me, and I think they failed miserably achieving that.
I overheard people saying, 'She thinks she's so great because she's Debbie Reynolds' daughter!' And I didn't like it; it made me different from other people, and I wanted to be the same.
Although my parents both liked her, they just didn't approve of a same-sex relationship. Nowadays, people say that you must let children be what they are, but when I was growing up, the parents defined the child - and my parents had a definite vision of how they wanted me to be.
The rule with my mom was that the only way that I could be an actress when I was young was that I continued to go to public school and get straight A's in all my classes.
Dad couldn't train me. He was too high-strung, like, 'Throw your jab!' and I'd start crying.
My brother Arthur was born in 1951. I came next, followed by three more siblings in rapid succession.
I went to Brooklyn College as an education major. It was a big deal in the family, but really, I was living for Mom and Dad.
I feared disappointing my father more than anything in the world.
However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.
