Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist - in other words, my mother did it all.
My father, Leo Henry Brown, really was talented - he could write. He had a gift, and he had a great, sly humor.
We have a lion, tiger, liger, which is the father is a lion and the mother is a tiger, black and spotted leopard, mountain lion, Asian leopard cats. Weve got a tremendous number of the exotic feline.
In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to 'disappear' my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out.
I was encouraged by my mother and, to a lesser extent, by my father.
The real Liberace - and I'll preface this by saying that I didn't know the real one - was a man who didn't come from much. His father left him and his family for another woman. His father was a musician, which I thought was pretty interesting.
My father's values and vision of this country obviously form everything I have as values and ideals. But this is not the ghost of my father running for the leadership of the Liberal party. This is me.
My father was the youngest of seven, and nobody lived to be 60. And so we were always sitting shiva in my house, and my father would say, 'Life goes on.'
When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.
My father had lifelong contempt for politicians.
What was the appearance of God the Father? Like that of a man... God has the likeness of fingers and hands and a face.
My dad claims that he was able to trace us back to the West Virginia Hatfields. When I look at the old pictures, the patriarchs have kind of a physical likeness to some of the men on the father's side of my family. I want it to be true.
I was about 10 when I first began to sing. My mother had been away for three weeks, and I learned 'Don't Cry for Me Argentina.' When she came back, I sang it in front of her, my auntie Linda, my father, my uncle Jim, and my grandmother.
The Lion King always makes me cry, especially when Simba's father gets trampled.
My father was a trained accountant, a BCom from Sydenham College and a self-taught violinist. In the 1920s, when he was in his teens, he heard a great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, and he was so inspired listening to him that he bought himself a violin, and with a little help from an Italian teacher, he learned to play it.
My father was only thirty-one when he died of a heart attack, much too young for a father to die and leave his young wife with five rambunctious little kids to take care of. I was the youngest. Only a couple of months old when he died.
My father's mother was from Liverpool and she had this very beautiful English china. I only wanted to drink my cocoa out of my grandmother's cup and saucer.
I shot my first lion at the age of 14 when a pride threatened my father's livestock while he was away on holiday.
When I was nine, we moved to Stanford University in San Francisco so that my father could do a Ph.D. I went to Terman Junior High in Palo Alto. It was terrible, because my hormones were all over the place, and I became an ugly adolescent full of rage and loathing.
Besides my father, who used to be a footballer at the local level, it is Messi for whom I started to play football.
