You know, I'm a father. I'm a brother. I'm a son. And I'm a grandfather. So many times I have to be the intermediary, the person to referee and help solve disputes and to protect and to guide.
I remembered some people who lived across the street from our home as we were being taken away. When I was a teenager, I had many after-dinner conversations with my father about our internment. He told me that after we were taken away, they came to our house and took everything. We were literally stripped clean.
My father literally fought his entire life to ensure the inclusion of all people because he understood that we were intertwined and connected together in humanity.
I remember, when I was doing 'Nicholas Nickleby', James Archer came to see me at the interval and said, 'My father would like to see you after the show.' It felt rather as if I had been summoned by the Queen, and I was cocky enough to think, 'Who the hell is he to summon me?'
My father's songs don't intimidate me; my father's songs are my songs. My songs are his songs. There's no intimidation.
I grew up around lots of men - my father, my brothers, my uncles - so I wasn't intimidated by them.
So my father was a person who never lied to me. If I had a question, he answered it. I knew a lot of things at a young age because I was intrigued.
I never met a person as determined as my mother. From working hard for six kids to just trying to keep the household down or maintain my father's discipline, my dad, I'm so much like my father too. My father was so introverted, quiet, shy, nice. I got attributes from my father and mother.
I have a feeling of reverence about my father being in his 80s - a feeling that I want to whisper, take soft steps, not intrude too much. He's like a stately old cathedral to me now.
My father was a politician, and a very important politician, and one of the leaders of the Iraqi Democratic Party, who believed in progress.
My mother is Irish, my father is black and Venezuelan, and me - I'm tan, I guess.
From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.
People do think I'm Jewish. But we're Irish Catholic. My father had a brogue.
My father was a gruff Irishman who was unable to express feelings and always insisted we be tough. Being a parent, for me, means creating what I didn't have. I want my children to feel love and be able to express it.
There are so many aspects of the game that you can work on - you can drive it father, you can drive it straighter, you can hit your irons higher and more consistently, you can get better with your wedges, and you can always putt better. There's never an end to that striving to get better in golf.
I have irrational fears, and they all go back to losing my father as a kid. I've never gotten over it.
My father was slower, but he was severer than my mother, who was quick but light and irregular in discipline.
My father did irrigation jobs, and I would sometimes accompany him, and that gave me a taste of what was going on in the innards of India.
When I was a kid, I used to pretend to be Bond; I used to make up scenarios and irritate my sister and annoy my mother and father pretending to be someone else, so I kind of was already acting when I was a child. I just didn't really know it.
My surname, Buttigieg (Boot-edge-edge), is very common in my father's country of origin, the tiny island of Malta, and nowhere else.
