I had those kind of parents where I watched all of these very sophisticated movies: 'Five Easy Pieces', 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.'
My parents weren't cultured people.
On my parents' scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.
When Richie Cunningham drank too many beers, his parents sat him down and explained their concerns. If you live on this earth, you find out that we are all the same.
When I was paralysed by polio at 13, I went into an isolation hospital and couldn't sit up, so I only took liquid food from spouted cups which the masked nurses would bring in and feed to me. I saw my parents only through glass; we couldn't touch.
My parents were always doubtful about my making a living as an artist. Even when I was up for the Turner Prize, my mum suggested I apply for a curator's job.
My mum was a dancer when she was a kid. Then my parents met and eventually had an art gallery; my dad taught himself how to frame pictures, and then he was a curator at an art gallery in the city I'm from. I'm an only child.
I was a very curious person because of my parents. They encouraged me to be as curious about as many things as I wanted.
I hold that the beginning of modern Irish drama was in the winter of 1898, at a school feast at Coole, when Douglas Hyde and Miss Norma Borthwick acted in Irish in a Punch and Judy show; and the delighted children went back to tell their parents what grand curses 'An Craoibhin' had put on the baby and the policeman.
I grew up cursing a lot. It felt natural. My parents told me to stop.
All parents should be aware that when they mock or curse gay people, they may be mocking or cursing their own child.
I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.
My parents and friends, they're Ph.D.s that worked as custodians, that owned their own businesses, that went bankrupt, that moved seven times, that sent their kid to Harvard, that don't have any money for retirement. Highs and lows of life.
I thought at the time of my parents' divorce that I was upset by deeper, more profound things and I was just taking it out on the joint custody agreement. But that disruption was bad enough. That was a huge deal for a teenager.
I am actually a bit chubby, and I eat everything. I eat in a way - if my parents fed me the way I choose to eat as an adult, they would've lost custody.
In the 5 years, well over 60,000 American families have been broken apart by the absence of insurance because the only way for parents to get treatment for their children is to turn the custody of those children over to the State.
My parents were immigrants who started a nursery as a way to get us kids through school. I learned around the dinner table about customer service and cash flow and paying bills.
What Republicans so cynically refer to as 'chain migration' is actually family-based immigration - a humane and compassionate policy of reunifying families. It allows spouses to be together, siblings to support each other, and children to be with their parents. It allows the immigrants who are already here to be successful.
In the 1960s, my first-generation immigrant parents were gifted the olive branch of a blue British passport when working for the British Army in Cyprus. It completely transformed the Paphitis story.
During my childhood in Cyprus, the British talked about the Cypriots as if the Cypriots were outsiders in their own country. And even though I was born in Cyprus, my parents were American, and so I was an outsider in the land of my birth.
