Simon Sebag Montefiore Quotes

I wouldn't say my mother was my best friend, because that sounds odd, but we have a really tight bond and she is my friend on Facebook. Although she only goes on it to check up on me and sometimes we argue about it.

My mother has never been involved in my professional life. I am very close to my mother but we keep it on a mother-daughter basis and not a work-related basis.

Family is conflict and it's something that we all relate to.

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

Interestingly, young people don't come to you for advice. Especially the ones who are related to you.

My mother smokes me out. We'll get these long periods of me thinking I'm too busy to call her up or e-mail her, and she'll send me something. My mom's a real whiner. I love her to death, but she always sends me these 'woe is me' things. I think she might be Jewish. I'm not sure. She's Baptist-Jewish, which is a double whammy.

I wish I had a great relationship with my mother.

My daughter said, 'I don't think granddad really suits you.'

My family is my biggest critic.

I never argued with my father, and it so happened that, unfortunately, the same kind of relationship passed on with me and Ranbir.

Family politics are worse than world politics. That's all I can say. You don't get to choose your family; you get to choose your friends. Your family is imposed upon you.

Fathers and sons are much more considerate of one another than mothers and daughters.

My mother, my father, I love 'em, I hate 'em, wish god I didnt have 'em, but thank god that he made 'em

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

When we got married, the first thing my wife did was put everything under both names - hers and her mother's.

And so we stood there in the kitchen, my mother and I, facing off over everything that had built up since June, when I was willing to hand myself over free and clear. Now I needed her to return it all to me, with the faith that I could make my own way.

Damien is Damien. When I don't put him in the squad my mother, who's 84, asks 'why isn't Damien playing?' She kills me about it and that's true

My father told me that if I ever did anything artistic, I was going to look like a hooker. I told him, 'With these huge boobs that I inherited from your mother, I already look like a hooker!'

Her mother was my wife," the Count roared, loudest of all. "You pathetic excuse for am money-grubbing fool, you disgrace to the face of the world." And with a shriek of disgust he turned and was gone. Guilietta was beside Inigo then, so excited. "Daddy likes you," she said.

They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis?

I appealed to my mother. I told her it wasn't fair the way the whole family was invading my dreams and she said, Arrah, for the love o' God, drink your tea and go to school and stop tormenting us with your dreams.

My father was English. He date-raped my mother so she's hated English men ever since. You know my boyfriend's English, and I'm, uh, I'm half-English, which she's never been real happy about. If she finds out I'm dating someone English, she'll ah, think I' turning my back on her and becoming a foreigner.' Cathy, that's the stupidest reason I've ever heard.

Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.

Don't call me son unless you're going to include me in your will. (When Adolph Rupp called him, "Son.")

In half hour my mother has managed to give me what my father couldn't: my past.