One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened.

When I was three, my father was three. When I was six, he was six... he needed me to escape from being 50.

My father did not drink beer. He said he didn't like the taste, and I was prepared to accept that I wouldn't like the taste either. So I stuck to bottled cider.

In pessimistic moments, when I was trudging London in search of an employer wanting to make use of such talents as I could offer, it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.

My mother had a master's degree and had been a schoolteacher before she started having kids at 30. But my father's family were landowners, farmer-merchants. Moneymaking was extremely important, like one of those semi-rapacious families in Lillian Hellman, where they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

My father is definitely not the kind of guy who'd place his children in key roles within his organization if he didn't think we could surpass the expectations he had for us.