I have always been a singer, a writer, and a musician, not as a prodigy or as in a trade handed to me by my parents, but because of an inner voice or maybe a command from beyond reality as it is usually defined.
I always performed when I was a child. My parents got very annoyed, because my brother and I had our little bedrooms upstairs, and I would plaster the house with posters with arrows pointing upstairs.
The guys who fear becoming fathers don't understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of child raising is not the child, but the parent.
When she became very ill with heart trouble, I saw that it would be impossible for my parents to provide for my studies, and I obtained their permission to go to sea to make a career for myself there.
My parents were disappointed I didn't finish college, and they were really upset when I went to Hollywood to become an actor. I was a big disappointment to them.
My 'act' was schoolwork. I was your basic, garden-variety, ambitious, upwardly mobile, hard-working Jewish boy from Brooklyn. I was bound to go beyond my parents. It was simply the way things were.
I'm lucky I had parents willing to be open and believe that an 11-year-old might know what she wanted to do. Or maybe they thought I'd find out that's what I didn't want to do.
My parents went through the dictionary looking for a beautiful name, nearly called me Banyan, flicked on a few pages and came to China, which is cockney rhyming slang for mate.
I feel for all the parents whose babies just keep waking up for years. My heart and back go out to you guys! You are my heroes, and I am not fit to walk in your shoes!
My father was very chic. My mum was always encouraging me. Some parents would say, 'Why don't you be a lawyer, a doctor, or something more important?' They never said that.
I would climb on roofs and jump off using my parents' bed sheet, hoping it would open like a parachute. I was always getting hurt, breaking a leg, you know, bruising, cracking my head open.
We didn't have much, but I was raised to believe if you had books, you had a lot. My grandfather and my parents made me and my twin brother Kiel read at least a book a week.
I came to this country when I was 12 years old because my parents wanted to give me new opportunities to succeed. President Obama wants everyone to have the chances I had.
A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.
But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent grou...
I miss my parents a lot. I obviously don't see them loads anyway because they live up north. But knowing that they're only a couple of hours away is a lot different than knowing that they're 12 hours away.
I was homeschooled on the road for kindergarten, then went to elementary school and a private Christian school while living with my grandparents until I graduated, and I loved it. But my parents were gone a lot.
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.
From the very start, if there was a spotlight, I would step into it. My parents wondered what to do with this insufferable show-off. They chose acting for me, and I'm very grateful I can still make a living from it.
I decided I would go to NYU so I could get into the comedy world and have legit housing, and my parents would not have trusted investing in a straight-up comedy career.
I just followed my parents' example and advice on living, which was to leave the world a better place than you found it. They were professional do-gooders, ministers of the church, social workers, teachers, and missionaries, that sort of thing.
