My father always tells me to be forgiving, as it purges you of pent-up negativity. I harbour no bitterness and malice towards anyone.
My father instilled those hard-working values.
Most of the kids that I meet in the street are serious hardened criminals that I meet in the street, never had a mother and a father to love them, to protect them, to teach them right from wrong and lead them out of crime and gangs and stuff like that.
My family originally lived in Brooklyn. Our first apartment was a little place above my father and uncle's hardware store in Coney Island. Now, don't get the impression that we were surrounded by merry-go-rounds, roller coasters and Ferris wheels. Nope, this was a little side street.
My father is a very hardworking guy, and that's his focus in life, so I got a lot of the paternal attention that a boy wants and needs from my grandfather.
I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.
I would think that to people like my father, and the people of his generation, Popeye is like a male priapist. So if you think in ancient terms, he would have a harem, a symbol of male energy.
My father was in a dance band, and I wanted to do what he did, play the saxophone, but I couldn't blow a note, so he suggested the guitar. Chromatic harmonica was actually my first instrument, and I got very good at it - not quite Stevie Wonder, but very good.
I was sitting on my mom's lap across from my father to see Kay Thompson at Ciro's. And I always remember this energy force, this woman flying around the room and singing these harmonies so everyone went, 'Wow!' So I thought, 'That's what I want to do.'
I have known Harold Ford Jr. since before he was born, in that his father was my driver in the 1966 governor's race, and has remained a friend of mine all these years.
We've all grown up with 'Ozzie and Harriet,' 'Father Knows Best,' 'Eight Is Enough.' White families have always represented the universal family.
We lived a lovely, middle-class, suburban life in Philadelphia. And I really thought that the TV programs of the '50s, like 'Father Knows Best' and 'The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet' Nelson were documentaries filmed with hidden cameras in our neighborhood.
As I flew back from New Zealand to bury my mother, it occurred to me that no matter how harrowing her loss was and how keenly it will always be felt, there was, nevertheless, a sense of relief that my father, sisters and I could say a final goodbye after the longest goodbye and relief that my mum had finally been released.
My father is sure that Israel keeps the Holocaust from happening again. I worry that it might hasten its recurrence.
Orrin Hatch is old enough to be my father, and I don't want my father running the United States Senate Finance Committee.
Waitresses, soldiers, rickshaw drivers, old ladies selling vegetables - my father would schmooze anybody. He was Clintonesque before the word existed. And, of course, it paid dividends. Ill-tempered guards at the most notorious border crossings waved him through with cheery smiles. Haughty maitre d's fawned over him.
I don't mind being a grandfather; I've been a mother for so many years. You just can't believe what it's like being a father. Especially when you come out of the chaos of the road to getting married and having children.
My father moved to Hawaii from Brooklyn and my mother came there as a child from the Philippines. They met at a show where my dad was playing percussion. My mom was a hula dancer.
I'm half Hawaiian and the haka is a very sacred thing, something your family teaches you - my father taught me.
I used to roof hay barns for my father. It's dangerous work. Writing is much better.
