Mike Nichols Quotes

I grew up in a very toxic home.

The only thing my old man ever gave me was a beating.

My parents got divorced when I was really young.

My mother was physically and emotionally abusive. My father was an extremely cold man.

My parents had this relationship that was really terrifying. I mean, the level of hatred that they had, and the level of physical abuse - my mother would beat up my father, basically - and I think I was drawn to images on television that were bright and reflective.

I had a very difficult upbringing.

I loved my parents... but that can never change the fact that my father's violence ruined my childhood.

I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn't really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you're trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.

I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.

I didn't have a good childhood growing up.

My parents were divorced when I was really young.

I came from a dysfunctional family - very dysfunctional. And my father used to find great humor in throwing me down the stairs.

Since I was probably eight years old, just about everyday, all the way until I was 14 or 15 years old, just about everyday my mom and my stepdad would roll around in the living room fighting.

My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.

Every single person in jail for a violent crime had a nightmare childhood.

My father rebelled ferociously against his conservative upbringing where his father physically abused him.

Mother beat the hell out of us. She'd have wild outbursts.

I was bought an electric guitar when I was 12, but my guitar teacher beat me up. I didn't like guitar lessons and I got quite bored. My teacher was obviously bored giving me lessons, and one day I offered him a liquorice toffee, but he didn't answer. So I threw it at him, it hit him in the face, and he sort of beat me up.

Our parents got divorced when I was 8 or 9.

Learning of my father's passing at age 55 not only shattered the world, far from home, that had become my reality, but catapulted my childhood and relationship with family - which had felt like another lifetime - into the present.

If we are to save our children then we must become people they will look up to. Children need heroes now more than ever because the poor children of this nation live with monsters every day. Monsters deprive them of heat in the winter, they don't fix their sinks and toilets, they let garbage pile up in their hallways, they kick them out of their homes, they beat them, shoot them, stab them-sometimes to death-they rape their bodies and their minds. Sometimes they lurk under the stairs. They scuttle around in the dark; you hear them in the walls gnawing, squeaking, occasionally biting a little finger.

In the Dolezal family, you couldn't always count on your parents to keep you safe.

I know just about everything that really goes on with domestic violence.

My family would try and trick us and I would come to a party and she would be there. When I tell you the 'Love & Hip Hop' scene is nothing compared to what was happening with me and mom... throwing things at each other, the cursing, the words.

Reflecting back on my childhood, I know it wasn't functional. It was pretty, pretty dysfunctional, and whose isn't?