Katherine Dunn Quotes

I knew nothing about my mum's family. Her parents were dead by the time she was 14. She was brought up by two aunts, and she only ever met one uncle.

My father left when I was three, and I have no memory of him. The most significant male figures in my life were my grandfather, in whose house I lived during the first 10 years of my childhood, and later my stepfather.

My father was gone when I was three years old.

My dad had been very absent, even when he was there. Then he left the family and moved away. Our relationship, it feels to me, ended when I was 13.

I think it's a pity for him that my father didn't have the pleasure of seeing me grow up. I think he missed out on something. But it doesn't matter. It's boring. I don't have any anger about it.

Apparently, my grandfather left from Cork to America without saying goodbye to his mother! The family in Longford is still not happy about that.

As a kid, watching your dad leave, that's pretty powerful.

When me and my brother would go to see our daddy playing, there'd be 30 people in the audience. I was only 14 or 15, but I realised something was wrong.

My dad was a terrible father. Dreadful. But he had a very difficult childhood. He was fostered - he never knew who his father was. So he had a very different attitude to family and kids. I don't have any issues. I'm not suffering some secret angst.

If you want to understand your parents more, get them to talk about their own childhood; and if you listen with compassion, you will learn where their fears and rigid patterns come from. Those people who 'did all that stuff to you' were just as frightened and scared as you are.

My parents separated when I was eight. I grew up with my mom alone.

My dad left when I was 3 1/2, and he left my mom and I.

I used to say that my own father was dead, because he might as well have been. He was in Argentina and didn't play a part in my life. He and my mother divorced when I was only two.

My father was out of my life when I was pretty young - when I was 7 years old, he was gone. I didn't see him for the rest of my childhood.

I never knew my father, and I'd hate to repeat that kind of cycle with my own children, because I'd also want to be there for them no matter what.

My real father died when I was two years old, so I never knew him. He was a barber in Chicago.

My father never kissed me, hugged me or told me that he loved me. As my only living parent, he became the filter through which I saw myself, the possibilities for my life, the world and all men. He was a conflicted and dark filter.

My sense of the family history is somewhat sketchy, because my mother kept a great deal to herself.

My parents divorced when I was 3 years old. They had a lounge act in Las Vegas, where I was born. The band broke up and the marriage dissolved, and my mother, my sister and I moved to Southern California. And I didn't see my dad a lot growing up; he was on the road a lot. I'd see him every couple years.

I didn't have a father when I was growing up, and I vowed to be there with my kids.

Actually, my parents were separated by the time I was about 2 years old.

No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.

I want to be the dad that my father never was.

I didn't meet my father until I was in the fourth grade.

I was 2 when my parents - actress Connie Stevens and singer Eddie Fisher - divorced. I was too young to experience the pain of their split, but it was rough growing up with a father who wasn't there.