Quotes from Sean Hepburn Ferrer

My father was a difficult and demanding man.

Her secret to happiness was simple and unpretentious. She had a beautiful house, would pick fruit and make jams, run the dogs in the fields, have a whiskey at five o'clock and cook a great plate of pasta. It wasn't complicated.

It's OK to choose your path, have a dream, not a fake one, and never let it get to your head then.

You have to dream in a wholesome way, not just dream about yourself, but dream about what's best for all.

People say to me, 'What do you think your mother would think about this new world with Instagram?' And I pause and I just say, 'Well, she really was the queen of Instagram because she was more photographed than anyone else.'

Children, like animals, and believe me, that's a compliment in my world, feel the difference. They know where the truth lies. They can feel it in a minute if someone is genuine.

We had a good education, but we didn't walk away feeling better than anybody else.

My mother often used to speak about her time during the war and during the famous hunger winter in Holland - in the latter part of the war there was no heating and very little food and so her mother used to say, 'You stay in bed most of the day to preserve your calories.'

She often used to talk about the fact that during the war, her mother, because there was a little food and no heating, would have her stay in bed throughout the day, especially during the Dutch Hunger Winter, to preserve her calories.

She lived her life believing in the power of simplicity. Whether it had to do with fashion, work or relationships, she used to say, Boil it all down to what counts the most: What is the essence of what you are trying to do, what is the most important thing? Things only get complicated when you are trying to address too many issues.

I believe that you can't know courage without conquering fear, and you can't really know joy without knowing sadness.

She was a very good cook and also believed that color combinations of the food on your plate were important: It isn't very interesting to eat a plate full of white, therefore it can't be very good for you either.

How can we heal our world without first caring for our children, without giving them a starting chance? We aren't taught how to deal with our feelings, how to recognize the issues that have the potential to assassinate our real chances at relationships; instead, we all make do with what tools we have. We all learn clever ways to divert the issues, to project our emotional pains onto others, often labeling these as their faults.

I think that emotional marks are made early on. Even if you can rationalize them as you grow up, they still leave that dank sadness you can never truly shake.

It's very difficult to have a conversation about yourself when you're the granddaughter of Audrey Hepburn, as it was difficult for me to have a conversation about something without, 'What was she like? What was she really like?'

An interesting question that has been recurring is that she appears to have been this delicate woman in all these films, but really she was a woman of substance wasn't she? And I say yes, you don't get to be Audrey Hepburn if you are a sort of 'babe in the woods.' It takes a lot of character, a lot of vision, good boundaries and hard work.

It's not just a world of dog-eat-dog and Trumps and all of this... there are people and there is hope and you can still get there and have a reasonable measure of success and appreciation.

My mother always told me, 'I didn't make a perfume or go sell toilet paper. I did something good with my name.'

I'm always opening magazines and seeing pictures of her in advertisements. Or I'll be in a hotel room in Tokyo and there she will be, on the television. Or I'll be walking through an airport or driving along a freeway and there she will be on a billboard.

She was humble and put herself down. She felt her feet were a little too big and she had a bump on her nose and a crooked tooth. But she didn't get the tooth fixed. She didn't get the nose broken and set straight. She worked with what she had.

Only after she had passed away did I fully comprehend to what extent she had truly touched everyone.

Not only did she represent inner and outer beauty and elegance, but all the work she did at the end of her life touched so many people. She created this extraordinary legacy.

I also was deeply touched by 'The Nun's Story' because it was the first time I saw my mother in something other than a romantic comedy.

This woman who was a style icon basically lived in a little cotton dress all her life - a simple life.