It is impossible to please all the world and one's father.
All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.
When I was a kid at four years old, that's when I started amateur wrestling with my dad and family. And when that's instilled in you, it never goes away.
My dad came to Korea one time, and then he pulls out a whole bunch of my headshot prints. He's like, 'Amber, you need to sign all of this for me because all of my friends want these.' I guess that's when I kind of realized I was 'famous.'
I know my Dad's a National League guy. I'm an American League guy. I tell him all the time we got better hitters. He's like well we got better pitchers. I'm like cause you all got those easy outs at the end.
After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.
Eugene Levy is such an incredible legend. He's truly Jim's dad from 'American Pie.' He's the kindest, most fatherly man, who is just concerned about everyone and making sure they're comfortable on set.
My mom and dad were divorced, and although they got along very well, my mom thought American television was reprehensible, so I was raised on the BBC. I kind of agreed with her. We watched American news, though.
There is nothing that would upset me more than my dad being bribed by the press. It's like, 'Just let them run it, then. Don't you give them ammunition.'
I do think that whatever ambition I may have had natively was amplified by my father's clear valuing of it. I knew that was what my dad really cared about.
My aunt Maxie had a plastic guitar in her closet, and I started playing that, going nuts on it. I went to stay with my dad, and he saw how much I was into it, and I put my first guitar on layaway. It was a Kay Starter Series guitar and Gorilla amplifier.
Recently, I was in Bernalda, my dad's ancestral home town in Italy. He has just refurbished a palazzo and turned it into a hotel, so we had my sister's wedding there. It was beautiful.
I'm a California Angels fan because that's the first game my dad took me to see, and they stuck with me.
I grew up in Edinburgh, but my dad's from Glasgow, and my mum's from Chingford in Essex, and I spent time in Ireland, too, so I was always somebody who absorbed accents. I would come back from visits, very much to the annoyance of friends and family, with an accent based on where I'd been.
We've come a long way from having one land line that was forbidden to be answered during dinner. We had no answering machine, just a dad who barked, 'Who calls during dinner? If it's important, they'll call back.' He was right.
I was born in Middletown, Connecticut, while my dad was getting his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology and anthropology at Wesleyan University.
I grew up in an environment where it was permittable to use violence to solve a problem. But it was not permittable ever to call the police under any circumstances. That was the kind of doctrine of my household. My dad was a career-long criminal, and you weren't calling the police for any reason.
I was built up from my dad more than anyone else.
I lost contact with my father for many years because of apartheid. For, like, six years, I didn't see my dad. And, now, this was the six years of being a teenager.
I was always a kid trying to make a buck. I borrowed a dollar from my dad, went to the penny candy store, bought a dollar's worth of candy, set up my booth, and sold candy for five cents apiece. Ate half my inventory, made $2.50, gave my dad back his dollar.