My only model for being a father was my father, an illiterate on the margin of society.
'Smurfs' just seemed like a great way to represent a young father to be, guy in a marriage, work in conflict, and I was really interested in the technical CG side of things. I'd never done a movie that I thought would be so physical and yet so precise. So I was intrigued by all of that.
A lot of people don't realize this, but probably the one person that gets made fun of in 'South Park' more than anybody is my dad. Stan's father, Randy - my dad's name is Randy - that's my drawing of my dad; that's me doing my dad's voice. That is just my dad. Even Stan's last name, Marsh, was my dad's stepfather's name.
I wanted to stay home and go to Maryland because I'm really the man of my house. We lost our father when I was 14. Somebody had to be there, so I had to take it and put that on my shoulders.
My father was a stone mason, and a talented amateur pianist and vocalist.
I was very fortunate in my gene mix. The gambling instincts I inherited from my father were matched by my mother's gift for analysis.
My father was a doctor, so I thought I was going to be a doctor, too, but I couldn't do maths; I couldn't do science. I was hopeless at chemistry.
I was raised in the '50s. I was taught by my father that how I looked was all that mattered, frankly.
When I was around 18, I got kicked out of my parents' house, and I wasn't allowed to take anything with me. I slept on YMCA towels for a whole semester in university before my father found out and bought me a mattress. I felt really free because I was finally living on my own, but I was also really depressed because I had nothing.
The things that have happened for me, to me, have helped me grow up. Especially the passing of my father. That was something that took me to another level of growing and maturing. That's whan I started to be more of a man.
My father always read obituaries to me out loud, not because he was maudlin or morbid, but because they were mini biographies.
When people tell me that I must get my maverick gene from my father, they are only half right. My father and I both have inherited our rebellious personalities from Nana. She has always lived her life on her own terms, something that was once considered quite scandalous, given the times she grew up in.
Well, Mozart is extraordinary not only in that he became virtuoso along the lines of his father, but that he had that compositional gift, that melodic gift. By the time he was four, he was doing piano concertos with harmony in the background.
I don't think my father was my mentor.
O most merciful Father, put far from me all my iniquities and all my offences; so that, by Thee made whole in body and in soul, I may be accounted worthy to approach the Holy of holies.
When my father died, those years when he was working on the Hubble came back to me, and it seemed fitting to imagine him as having somehow merged with the large mystery that the universe represents.
I was six years old when 'The Little Mermaid' was released in 1989 and was immediately struck by the fiery-maned, melodic-voiced, tail-swinging mermaid protagonist. She spoke to me on levels deeper than her father's oceanic kingdom.
Since Sandy Hook, I have sat back as a father and been mesmerized by the inability of the federal government to do anything substantively on gun safety.
My father is still so much a part of me - from my physique and fast metabolism, which I'm so thankful for now, to my sense of connection to the universe.
My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.
