John Grant Quotes

If you are going through something with one of your parents, you know that there is this feeling inside you constantly that something is wrong. Even if you want to pretend that it doesn't matter to you or you don't care, the truth of the matter is that you do, because they are your parents and you love them.

I've been estranged from my father since I was eight.

Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication.

The real demon in my life is my father.

I think the deepest problem is between my parents and me. I just don't know if it will ever be the same.

I certainly feel sad about the alienation from my son.

Many fathers and sons never get to reconcile their differences or come to an understanding that fills the gap between love and expectations.

It's tough... My real father - I have my stepdad, my mom remarried - but my real father lived in Thailand, so I barely saw him as it is. So it was really hard for me to go back there and just, I feel like I have a lot of unanswered questions.

You know the troubles I've had with my two older children. I can't understand why it turned out so badly. I tried to give them everything. I loved them and tried to keep them near me, even when they didn't return my love. Well, I couldn't make them love me, but they could have shown some respect. I couldn't insist on love, but I could insist on respect.

My mother and I had a lot of distance between us emotionally, although, on the surface, most of the time, we appeared good and friendly, and all that. But I was a problem. I was a street kid.

My stepfather was fond of letting me know, quote, 'I ain't your... damn daddy.' That was something that was painful, to put it mildly.

I choose not to see my parents because I value myself - and they didn't value me or my mind.

I didn't want to hurt my parents' feelings about how hard certain things were in my 20s, how hard it was when my dad left my senior year before I went to college.

My relationship with my dad was a little rocky, sure. The time that I spent with him was basically two hours of Little League practice, six or seven days a week, from the age of five until whenever. If we lost, there was no talking the whole way home. But that seemed normal to me.

I don't want to keep talking about my upbringing because people always resort to the past and what happened when I was younger.

My background's Arab and I'm quite fiery, stubborn and used to shouting and expressing myself quite loudly, and Inez and I have our little fall-outs as mum and daughters do.

I love my son, but I was never there for him, so I understand why he hates me.

The family unit is very interesting because these are people that you're supposed to be the closest to in your life, and yet that's where you find the greatest distances between people as well - especially between parents and kids.

To think that Woody was in any way a father or stepfather to me is laughable.

For me, the interesting thing about anorexia is that you show your wound. There's no hiding it. So my anger and sense of disappointment, all the stuff I was out of touch with, became this visible rebuke to my parents.

It's no secret that I have, at best, a strained and awkward relationship with my dad. The Wasserman family - my mom, my sister, Lew and Edie - raised me. They are the people I define as my family.

My mother didn't listen to my first tape, or my second one.

The woman who gave birth to me, I don't have a relationship with. I'm not looking for one, either.

Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father. I liked my father a lot, he was a swell fellow, but I didn’t see him very often because my mother was bitter about him and did everything she could to prevent me from seeing him.

My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy--a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us--which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.