Jonny Bairstow Quotes

I have painted my family so frequently because they are the one who really affect me the most.

I'll probably always be 'Timothy Spall's son' and it's something I'm proud of. Maybe one day as well as that, they'll say of Timothy Spall that 'He's Rafe Spall's dad'.

Then to have your baby playing at the school you played at and having him play well is a special treat.

One of the things that's important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.

Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come.

Our sport probably has the best history and tradition of being engaged in international competition.

If your family was part of the movie business, then watching 'Moguls & Movie Stars' is like looking at the family photo album: hilarious to members of the family, numbingly boring to those outside the family circle.

Playing in the big leagues while my father is still active is the biggest thrill of my life. I try to see him play whenever I can.

I was always an athlete; my grandfather and my dad are basketball players, and I played sports my whole life.

I was captain of the rugby side at Shrivenham - as were my two brothers after me.

No one works harder at inspiring athletes all over the world than our team at Nike. Creating those experiences requires an amazing amount of energy, a steady flow of big ideas to excite and surprise people, and a constant dialogue that connects us on a personal level.

My grandfather was a history teacher, one reason the subject has been an integral part of my life.

My dad used to play basketball, now he gets to see me in the NBA Finals.

I look at him [son Eric] and I think of my dad all the time.... I was born to be a dad.

I recently watched that Lucie Arnaz-produced documentary [Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie, 1992] about her parents [Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz], and I saw so much of my own childhood there.

Every goal is hard work, especially in such an excellent league as the Bundesliga; or even take the Champions League.

I get a lot of my inspiration from my family, but I never got to meet my dad's dad.

Obviously I've been reading Kafka for a long long time, since I was really young, and even before I ever read him I knew who he was. I had this weird sense that he was some kind of family. Like Uncle Kafka. Now I really think of him that way, the way we think about an uncle who opened up some path for being in a family that otherwise wouldn't have existed. I think of him that way as a writer and a familial figure.

The past lives within the present, and our ancestors breathe through our children.

A name is so important. A surname connects you to your past, to your family. Even a given name has meaning - why did your parents pick that particular one?

You can't really explain competing in Olympic event to someone. You can say, "Oh, that was really tough." And that literally means nothing to someone. If you can give some sort of comparison, because that's really all track and field is about any way....Usain Bolt runs a time and you get to see what everybody else's time is. It would just be interesting to compare Olympians to somebody who doesn't train their whole life.

I always defended my father, as a child, and I think I'm still defending him - his policies at least. Oh, he wasn't at all a politician, in no sense of the word. He was sustained in his work only by a blind faith in India - he was preoccupied in such an obsessive way by the future of India. We understood each other.

The more a daughter knows the details of her mother's life [...] the stronger the daughter.

We all hold on to some image of the family we want, based one way or another on the family we had. Lots of people are thrilled about the families they came from, others couldn't get away fast enough. Most people fall into that vast middle ground: great affection mixed with a few ideas for improvement. A couple of things they wish could have perhaps been done differently.

I went to a Catholic University and there's something about being a Catholic-American. You know, St. Patrick's Day is, I'm Irish-Catholic. There's alcoholism in my family. It's like I've got to be Catholic, right?