I got a note from my father, who said that Success is wonderful, if you don't inhale. That was his own aphorism, and I think it's the very best thing he could have said to me or anyone else on the subject.
I remember the hours I had spent in Father's library, drugging myself with books so I could forget my doom for an hour..
When my father was growing up inside the Old City of Jerusalem, he and his friends liked to trade desserts after diner.
I'm told I'm like my father, and he was the most wonderful man. But I think he was gentler than me.
For me it was a normality having a father who was a world champion. I grew up with that, so it was never extra pressure. And I've never felt the need to emerge from his shadow.
On and on they went these nevers, but despite their random natures I found myself following almost every one. Perhaps because I never wanted to disappoint my father.
My parents had to go to Ohio to get married in 1965 because it was still illegal in Mississippi. My white father and black mother.
When my father was arrested, we didn't know where they had him. My mother found him at the house of torture. It was called Villa Triste.
Although raised on the farm - my grandfather was an unsuccessful fundamentalist preacher turned farmer - my father and his brother both became professors.
The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! 'Father, the atheists?' Even the atheists. Everyone!
In a way, my father was lucky. He had a hunch that his vision of the National Gallery would interest other collectors and persuade them to come in with him, and that hunch proved to be right.
I was lucky enough to spend some of my school days in Barbados, where my father was working, and this gave me a taste for hot weather.
My parents were born in Norfolk and spent their early years working in the big houses of that rural English county, my mother as a cook and my father as a handyman and chauffeur.
I am not going to say I have been a saint. I have not been a perfect man. None is perfect but the Father, which is in Heaven.
We lived on a farm outside a town of about 900 people. My father was the principal of the elementary school. It was a typical Southern town - there are a lot of churches, and it's dry.
Either Jesus had a father, or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it.
While confronting the problems of the present, I often find myself thinking back to the world of books as it was experienced by the Founding Fathers and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.
My father taught me things about body language that psychologists have been catching up with ever since. He always knew when I was lying, because my posture was all wrong.
Be it Valentine's Day, Father's Day or Mother's Day, I feel all days are reminders of some feelings. February 14 doesn't hold any special relevance for me.
I have to play baseball to make me happy. I have to be an athlete. But when it's all said and done, I'll be a normal father. A normal-type house man.
But to do it professionally is a quantum leap difference and my father had to be persuaded by these kind of Ivy League professors that I should go to the Yale Drama School, another one of the stories in there.
