My dad has always been such a great dad, and he's brought so much culture to my life. He dragged me to see every single movie at the cinématheque as a kid. I saw everything from Star Wars to Bergman.
Father or stepfather - those are just titles to me. They don't mean anything.
I come from a musical family. Mom was a piano teacher for a large portion of her life, and Dad is a saxophone hobbyist who grew up in England during the heyday of Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott. I started taking piano lessons from my Mom, but it's too easy to slack off with your parent, so she passed me on to a friend of hers, where I got more motivated to play music by playing pop hits and TV themes. I did some classical training, but I was always more into the really thematic stuff.
I can't think of anything worse than being brought up by two gay dads.
My dad supports me. He said, "I wished when I was at your age I started doing rock and roll music. Then I wouldn't have to be a fashion designer. " And I just laugh and keep it moving and appreciate his support.
Rich dad went on to explain that the world was filled with different types of entrepreneurs. There are entrepreneurs who are big and small, rich and poor, honest and crooked, for-profit and not-for-profit, saint and sinner, small town and international, and successes and failures. He said, "The word entrepreneur is a big word and it means different things to different people. "
I think my dad [ Stephen Hawking] would have been pleased if I had turned out a scientist because he truly believes that is the most interesting career open to anyone. But he also believes that you have to follow your own path in life and so he certainly wasn't going to push me toward theoretical physics when it didn't look like I was going in that direction naturally.
Music is more of a hobby to me than my hobbies, if that makes sense. I love music; my dad and brother were very musical, and music just happens to be one of my hobbies that became my vocation.
I would never complain about the position I'm in or the attention I get. At the end of the day, I'm very lucky to have what I have and do what I do, but I don't see myself as any different from anyone else who works hard and is a dad and a husband.
The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
I remember my daughter Deni coming along, and she was so pure and caring of everybody and everything. And somehow, this little being managed to get around all the obstacles - the gun turrets, the walls, the moats, the sentries - that were wrapped around my heart. My heart at that time needed her. I think it's the best thing going, parenthood.
A father is a man who expects his son to be as good a man as he meant to be.
As a little kid, not only is my dad Jo-Jo White, but M. L. Carr is involved in the family, Red Auerbach is my godfather, and my stepmother was an Olympic-caliber sprinter. Athletes were all around. I happened to be a natural athlete. If I wasn't, it might have been hell. But I never got any pressure from my mom and dad to be an athlete.
What I'd really like, Dad, is to borrow the car keys.
The lesson of Pearl Harbor ought never to be forgotten, and of course the motto that came from that, 69 years ago, the war which my dad fought, was 'Remember Pearl Harbor, never again. ' We need to keep that to mind.
My mother and dad played the fiddle and the guitar.