My father was an insurance man and a small-time gambler. He was a good man, but he had an eye for the racehorses, and I saw how it used to bother my mother. I've never gambled a dime. Never, in all those years in Vegas.
From the time I was a small boy, I remember working in the fields with my grandfather and father. We weren't growing grapes, but we were farming crops, creating something good out of the earth.
By the time I reached high school my father's grocery store had made our life adequately comfortable and I was able to choose, without any practical encumbrances, the subjects that I wanted to pursue in college.
I did the cover of Cigar Aficionado, so I'm supposed to talk about loving cigars. I've smoked them a couple of times. My father used to smoke cigars. I love the idea and the concept, and I love the smell of cigars.
When I was a child, my father taught me to put up my fists like a boy and to be prepared to defend myself at all times.
My father was raised with brothers, he was a football player and a boxer, he was a chief petty officer in the Navy, he was a man of his times.
My grandfather was a very elegant individual. My father also. He was a lawyer and farmer in Cuba. In Miami, he had to go to work wherever he could. But whenever it was time to go out, you saw how they cared for how they looked.
Ron Reagan amazingly qualifies as an honest broker. I asked him if he was a mama's boy and he said no, more of a papa's boy. At the same time he was willing to say that his father had many shortcomings and needed to be held accountable.
I adored my birth father and constantly worried that I was being disloyal to him and his schoolteacher roots if I spent too much time performing and enjoying it.
My father worked, and my mother played bridge. Every time I went out of the house, I was chauffeur-driven with my nanny next to me to stop me being kidnapped.
When I was young I was one of the second generation of black people in Holland. My father was the first. My mother was white, and living with a black man at that time and having a how-you-say half-caste boy is not easy.
One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
My father was a doctor in Moravia, in the south of the country. There were a number of Jewish doctors in the hospital there, and at a certain point - almost too late, really, but in time - they were all sent overseas by their employer.
And from my place, and from the time that I went through my divorce, I also had my father pass away in the middle of all that. And it kind of made everything else just kind of like the back burner, you know.
Capitán Vidal: Tell my son the time that his father died. Tell him... Mercedes: No. He won't even know your name.
Sheriff of Nottingham: Howdy, Friar! Well, it looks like I dropped in just in time! Father Saxton: What does that big-bellied bully want here?
The most surprising thing for my mother and father was when I was actually earning more money than them by the time I was about 18. They thought I was going to be the ne'er do well, who they'd have to keep worrying about.
My father has been a voice of encouragement in times of desperation for so many people. But he died when I was so young that, for me, his music has been a way for me to get to know him better.
My father's record collection was full of New Orleans music of all kinds. I used to listen to the radio in New York, and all there was on it at the time was Madonna and Michael Jackson, so it sort of passed me by.
I wanted to be an actor ever since I got on stage for the first time, aged 13. Before that, I thought I might follow in the medical footsteps of my parents: my father was a doctor, my mother a pharmacist.
My father read 'The New York Times,' my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.
