My father said, If you want to do acting, you have to be successful, which is a silly thing to say.
The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.
Yes, Jean Monnet was the father of the concept of a United States of Europe and his efforts more than those of any other single man helped change the thinking of European leaders.
I've been an activist since I was a teenager. I was always curious about what we would now call social justice. I remember just trying to navigate growing up poor in an overpoliced environment with a single mother and a father who was in and out of prison.
I was the seventh child in a family of eight siblings. We lost our father very young, and my mother had pretty much single-handedly brought us up.
I am quite handy; not to sound bragadocious, but I've been working with wood and building things my entire life. I used to be a skateboarder and built ramps with my father. Then, the first two years I lived in Los Angeles, I worked as a carpenter building sets.
My father used to say to me, 'The only limit to your success is your own imagination.' I actually believed that - like, I'm still coming to terms with the fact that I might not be an Olympic figure skater.
The entire Mayron's Good Baby natural skin care line is free from synthetic fragrances, paraben, sodium lauryl sulfate, and DEA. It was a wonderful experience to work with my father on the creation of these natural products.
My father and a bunch of my cousins and uncles, they didn't have the opportunity to use FaceTime or Skype, all these different technologies and advancements that we have.
My father died in 1957, just before I was born. My mother went to her Jewish aunt, who slammed the door in her face.
Oh, that all the things my father had told me about how disgusting Washington is are true. And again it's the system - there are lots of nice, well-meaning people there. But it's a sleazy place. And politics is all about doing favors.
My father was a doctor, and I admired him and got along well with him. He took me with him on house calls. We were living in Flushing, which was then a sleepy village of 25,000 - before the subway got there. I've been sure I wanted to be a doctor since I was about 12.
It was a very scary place to be. I don't think any mother or father would like to have their five year old wandering alone in the slums and train stations of Calcutta.
I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.
Back home, I find small towns very peaceful. When my father and uncle were still in the film business, we had a tradition of travelling to the temple town of Srisailam to screen every film before its release. I still go there often.
My mother had seven children in seven years. No twins. She also had a three-legged beagle who was compelled to bite strangers, a freakishly big double-pawed tomcat who regularly left dead rabbits on the front doorstep, and 70 white mice that one or another of us had smuggled home from my father's research laboratory.
My mother was able to get out of Germany because her father was Russian and those with a Russian passport could leave. My father was not so fortunate. He had to be smuggled out of Germany by being tied to the bow of a vegetable freighter that was leaving in the North Sea. He almost lost a leg because it was so cold, but he ended up in France.
My father lost an eye to a snapped cable while trying to rescue trapped miners, though he kept on working for fifteen years afterward.
I really love the Olympics: Daley Thompson's back-flip, Derek Redmond's father helping him finish the 400m after his hamstring snapped at the 1992 Games in Barcelona, Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson, Sir Steve Redgrave - childhood memories are flooded with these moments and idols.
My father raised us like... we were not allowed to see people in any sort of colors, but also we were not allowed to call people fat. If ever we were to say, 'Oh that fat person, or this person,' he would make us put a bar of soap in our mouth and count to 10. We weren't allowed to look at people like that.
