Toots Thielemans Quotes

My dad bought me a guitar and people would ask me to play.

The story about me, apocryphal or not, is that I could sing before I spoke. My parents went into bedroom one day and there I was standing in the crib singing God Bless America.

Grandma Holly told me at three years old that I had a voice of an angel, and I just never stopped singing.

I don't know my biological father. That could have had a huge impact on my life had it not been for the fact that my dad married my mom when I was one and raised me as his own.

In retrospect, golf for me was an apparent attempt to emulate the person I looked up to more than anyone: my father. He was instrumental in helping me develop the drive to achieve, but his role, as well as my mother's, was one of support and guidance, not interference.

My mom nor my father never pushed me into the music business. I always did it because I wanted to.

What is the son but an extension of the father?

My father turned my life around insisting I be more than I was and by believing I could be more.

When the time came to say, "Mom, I want to do this as a job," it was brutal. She was really against it. There were screaming matches. Some people are shut down by that and get defeated by it, and other people are empowered by the negativity. My father kind of encouraged me through that.

I'm a parent. I think we're responsible for the problems that young people have. I believe that. I don't blame them for any of it. I blame us for what we haven't done as mothers and fathers, not sticking together as a unit.

It has always been my belief that children inherit the suppressed tendencies of their parents. A clergyman's son frequently shows abnormal tastes for the pleasures that his father denied himself.

My father built low- and moderate-income housing in Queens and Brooklyn. I learned a lot from him. But I went in a different direction. I built Trump Tower in Manhattan, the most luxurious building in the world. It's not going to be easy for my son, but maybe it shouldn't be easy. Life is, after all, a test.

Most of all, I want to thank my father, up there, the man who when I said I wanted to be an actor, he said, 'Wonderful. Just have a back-up profession like welding.'

Some parents have difficulty expressing their love physically or vocally. I do not ever recall my own father using the words, "Son, I love you," but he showed it in a thousand ways which were more eloquent than words. He rarely missed a practice, a game, a race, or any activity in which his sons participated.

The greatest gifts my parents gave to me...were their unconditional love and a set of values.

Fathers have a lot to do to make up for having sons.

I took no money to make art, but my woman backed me up on it and I want my children to see their father happy.

I am the son of an illiterate father and mother.

What scares me is not living up to be a good enough father to my son and letting down my family - not being there enough and not being able to give enough of yourself.

There's a kind of a line between music and math, so I guess I got the music gene, thank goodness. But my mother wasn't too thrilled. She wanted me to go to university and get a degree or do something, and my father, he liked opera so he wasn't too thrilled either, because he wanted me to be an opera singer and I didn't have - as he said, I don't really have the strength to do that.

I remember there was a little organ which I'd tap my fingers on all the time. My interest in the instrument was so obvious, one day I got home from school and there was a real piano in my bedroom.

I always knew I wanted to be a performer, and my mother started taking me to dance classes when I was five. My mother is a teacher, my father works at an insurance company. When I said I wanted to be a performer, people went, "Yeah, right." You don't do that where I come from.

My older brother was the guitar player in the neighborhood band. My parents were the cool ones that had the basement for rehearsal. Rather than hang with my peers after school, I wanted to just listen to the band. More than that, I wanted to play.

Fathers are so necessary as examples and guides for our children in wisdom and virtue. Without father figures, young people often feel orphaned; left adrift at a critical moment in their growth and development.

This caste system had grown by the practice of the son always following the business of the father.