Howard Jacobson Quotes

Nothing is quite so emotional and passionate as what goes on inside of a family. People are driven to distraction by a father or a mother or a husband. Or a child.

Parents always stay older than you, but sibling sort of become adults together, and that complicates that relationship, I think.

I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.

When my younger sisters were born, I was in high school and college. I was at my mom's all the time but never changed them or fed them.

I have no problem putting my feet up and watching football but my mother-in-law is always doing stuff.

Families are the deepest, most screwed up relationships that we have.

It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night.

I have two sisters; one is two years older, and one is eight years older. That helped me understand how completely different sister relationships can be.

Who hasn't had an argument with their mother-in-law?

Every person I've ever met always thinks their parents are weird.

Sometimes it is worth any amount of suffering just to prevent giving your parents the opportunity to be right.

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.

My mom had me at a young age, like 20, and she was the oldest child. All her brothers were seven and 10, so I was like a younger brother more so than the oldest child. I was the younger brother to all my uncles, so they were going through their childhood and their teenage years, and I was right there.

Like with me, I just see my mum and dad as parents - I don't see my dad individually as a man, my mum individually as a woman.

Once you've taken account of the quality of sibling relationships, knowing about the quality of parenting doesn't add much information.

There's an image that my mother saved my father in 1968 and everything was a bed of roses after that. And that just wasn't true. There were as many struggles in the 1980s and the 1990s as there were in the 1960s.

Families are complex organisms.

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.

I was brought up to respect my father and not to love him.

Everybody knows the mother-daughter relationship is one of the most complex there is.

Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.

Yes, a family is interesting. You can get a lot of drama in the conflicts there. It's like the sea. It seems calm, but inside there is conflict.

As you get older, I have seen it a lot... fighting among siblings. The reason is usually money or spouses. But my kids don't fall into that trap.

I can't say it was always ice cream and rainbows in our house. We would yell and we would fight and I was a terrible child, and it was, but, on the other hand, laughs. I don't think I'm alone in this.

I saw my parents go through tough times between 1979 and 1983. They almost split up.