Ellen Hopkins Quotes

My father was a food lover and a deadbeat dad, and maybe a connection between good food and bad dads was forged early, in the deepest folds of my subconscious, where we make so many decisions about our parents.

I forgive my mom for being a psycho and my dad for being a loser.

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.

Anyone must remember that dad left when I was 3 years old. Mom and I lived out of the limelight. We lived a totally different life.

Well, I was about six or seven, and my mother and father separated.

I didn't know my dad for a long time. My dad was on drugs and my dad was at the VA Hospital, my dad was off in his own world selling drugs or using them or there would be crack heads in the house or whatever it would be.

My mother wasn't any better than my father.

A lot of people ask why I don't talk about my dad, and I want to, I just don't have that many stories. When he moved out, he moved to a different state, so it was just my mom and I.

My parents got put into jail, both my mom and my dad.

My mom moved up north to make more money to support the family, and I was left with my dad and I was just bounced around from one family to another.

My father had a tremendous influence on me, and I think many children who come from broken homes, esp. when they're very early. My dad left when I was 3 1/2, and he left my mom and I. It was something in order to empower myself.

Most of us have grown up, you know, I think there are very few people who have grown up in a home that was, like, super normal. You know, we all have dispositions because maybe you didn't have a mom or you didn't have a dad, maybe your mom died early or maybe mom and dad argued or they got a divorce or who knows? You have issues that maybe you've started younger or maybe you have your own issues because you have them.

The Christmas after Mom & Dad split up, they both went crazy buying us presents. Matt, Jonny, and I were showered with gifts at home and at Dads apartment. I thought that was great. I was all in favor of my love being paid for with presents. This year all I got was a diary and a secondhand watch. Okay, I know this is corny, but this really is what Christmas is all about.

You know, people see [August: Osage County], and I tell them that it's based on my family, and they assume that I came from some kind of horrible, hysterical circumstances. That's not true. My family, my nuclear family, was actually very close. My mom and dad were great parents and they encouraged a real rich, creative life for me and my brothers. My extended family, like every family, has some darkness, and some violence of some kind, emotional or otherwise, in their past.

I was born and raised in East Los Angeles by a single mom who had three biological kids and adopted four more. I never met my dad.

The house was big enough for my brother and me to have firecracker wars at one end and leave Mom and Dad undisturbed at the other. When firecrackers weren't available, we attacked each other with pennies and marbles and clumps of Crisco, which made brilliant greasy asterisks when you missed and hit the wall.

I used to tell my mum to leave my dad when I was, like, nine. I loved my father, don't get me wrong. I really loved him, but he wasn't a good dad, and he wasn't a good husband.

My father - he was an orthodontist - was supposed to sell his practice and move down to Florida, but that never happened... I would sometimes spend the summer with him and visit him, but he never lived with us.

I can distinctly remember being the only boy in my class whose parents had separated.

I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.

My childhood was not always a happy one because we had to visit our father in jail, as my father was often imprisoned by the Pakistani rulers.

My dad was obviously a really quirky, unconventional Asian man who didn't care about what other people thought. When he would fight with my mom, he would be really dramatic. He would be like, 'Devil, get away, for I am God's property.' He would say crazy things that were so melodramatic but so theatrical and funny.

Nick spent his first years on walks in his stroller and Snugli, playing in Berkeley parks and baby gyms and visiting zoos and aquariums. His mother and I divorced when he was 4. No child benefits from the bitterness and savagery of a divorce like ours.

I can understand a family that's imploding. I have experience of that in my own life.

My parents divorced when I was eight; I never really knew my dad, and my mom raised my older sister and brother and me alone. It was challenging.