Quotes About Upbringing

I didn't grow up being a performer, really. I played baseball.

I grew up with my parents always listening to rock music. My dad wanted me to play guitar, but I always had more of an ear for drums. He really wanted me to be a guitar player, like him.

We definitely have a football mentality. My dad was a football player also, so just growing up, that's how it was.

I was raised to please people in authority, and I'd also come from a sheltered boarding school, so I was very naive and young for my years.

My mother was largely a housewife until she and my father were divorced. No one in the family read for pleasure - it was a very unintellectual household - but my mother did read to us when we were little, and that's how I started to read.

I was brought up a Catholic, so I take no pleasure in guilt.

In Hoboken, when I was a kid, I lived in a plenty tough neighborhood.

I was so fortunate to be raised in a household filled with books and - as you might imagine to be the case in the Bush home - plenty of conversation.

I grew up a plumber's son in Philadelphia.

I come from a blue collar family, but my personal life isn't. I didn't get the gene that my grandfather had in spades. He was a local hero. Built the church that I went to. Built the house I grew up in. Steamfitter, pipefitter, electrician, mechanic and plumber. I wanted to do those things. But it just didn't come easy.

I can fix dishwashers. I was brought up in a castle with no money and lots of imagination. I learnt a lot about plumbing at an early age.

My mother was an actress and a director, as well. And my father was a playwright and poet.

I grew up writing. It was very natural in my household. My father was a poet, and his mother had been a novelist back in Hungary. I don't think I really thought about it being my career until high school, which is still pretty early, but it was a while there of just assuming this was something everyone did all day long.

I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas.

Poets, I think, are born. You can't teach it. It's genetic - the circumstances of how you were raised... and there's probably some Irish in your blood lines.

In the area I grew up, there were loads of gangs and stuff like that, and I was a bit of a fighter growing up. So, it was easy to be attracted to it, but I had my brother there giving me good advice, telling me it's pointless joining gangs, and things like that. I've always listened to him.

My childhood had much clarity. I didn't see abuse. I didn't see my parents bickering. I didn't live in a dysfunctional family.

Mum got me involved in every activity under the sun - singing, dancing and drama classes at the Anna Scher theatre school.

There are a lot of classical musicians in my family, so I grew up with that being kind of normal.

I grew up with a lot of classical music around.

I love Western classical music - I grew up on that thanks to my parents who loved it too.

My dad was working in the street and my mum was working every day as a cleaner. My life was like that.

I was born into the Church of England but in the most nominal way possible you can imagine, so it's Christmas and Easter. And then like a great many clergy in the Church of England I actually got nobbled by being a chorister.

You feel like you need to deal with a lot if you're from Cleveland, so you learn to let things roll off your back, and you learn that humor is the best way to deal with it.