Anthony Hopkins Quotes

My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.

As everyone, you do end up becoming your mother, but also as you're acting, I find out you become every member of your family, bits come out without you really wanting them to come out.

As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.

When I was growing up my mother would say, 'Your dad may have to learn about being a father because he lost his own and that would have affected him'.

I didn't have a mother; I had a mama. I measure other women by the stature of my mama.

Families are endlessly fascinating. We all have one, and they have a great impact on who we are and what we do - Freudian as that is.

It used to be that a son could look at the father, and pretty much know what life was gonna be like as an adult. There was confidence in that, and comfort in that, and frustration also.

Women have always ruled my life, be it my mother, my wife, my assistant, or my daughter, so I don't really fight with them. I relinquished control years ago.

Relationships are so much a rerun of our parental relationships. We're rerunning the relationship they were in together and we're rerunning the relationship we had with them with our lover.

All my life, I've wanted to write a book inspired by my relationship with my grandfather. Basically, my grandfather was a guy who everybody in the family regarded as disagreeable at best. But I loved him intensely. He was wonderful to me.

I am truly my mother's son.

Looking back, I can see that the women I loved, at least early on, were status symbols. I suppose, in that sense, I was my mother's true disciple. She'd taught me that a good man, though elusive, could transform one's whole life once he was caught.

We are a total of our sum parts, right? I came from a family of very strong women - black women. And if I go back as far as my great grandmothers, there was always that love and the ability to be nurturing. Then I grew up in a household where my father was the one who was more affectionate with me.

If your mom cries a lot, you probably cry a lot. It's what you learn.

I am the younger version of my father. I try to be as normal as I can.

Every boy grows up trying to be like his father, but what if a boy grows up to be like his mother?

Family relationships are just so fascinating - how they shape you as a person, how you can wound each other, how you're imprinted in a way by your family and the conditions under which you grow up.

I'm the product of my parents' dreams and aspirations.

I don't know that I've gotten to the point where people know me more than my dad or that I ever will or even want to get to that point.

I was thinking about it: so many of my stories are about my family life, not about being related to a lot of famous people. That's my grandma, that's my mama, my daddy, my aunt, my uncle, my stepdaddy. I'd probably tell them even if they weren't well known.

To me, it felt that if I give up my name, I am also sending a message to my children, saying my name was not important enough as your father's; I am not as important as your father. That is a message we are passing down generation after generation without realising.

Men with purple hearts carry silver guns and they will kill a man for what his father has done. But what my father did, I don't live it: no, I am not him.

Wounded?” was all I could manage. “Yes,” said Pat. “And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.

The whole blame goes to the parents. They have lived as ambitious beings; they have destroyed themselves. Now they go on giving their heritage to their children - their unfulfilled desires, their incomplete ambitions. In this way diseases pass on from one generation to another.

I know I'm going to have to get beyond being George H.W. Bush's son and Barbara's son -- for which I'm really proud. And I'm going to get beyond being George W.'s brother for which I am extraordinarily proud as well, there's a lot of interest in finding the ways that we are different and all this. Well, the simple fact is that we're all on our own life's journey -- my brothers and sister are different than me.