Patricia Arquette Quotes

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.

I probably gave up on my dad when I was born.

Though she doesn't remember any trauma, she said that her parents told her she cried on a daily basis and her grandmother resorted to passing out candy so the kids would play with her. Though it was a humorous moment, Mila said, "I know, God bless her. She's an amazing, amazing woman."

I don't like feeling vulnerable. I think my mum and dad's divorce affected me more than I let on.

I would never say I had a bad childhood at all.

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.

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

I called my mother up and I said, 'You know, I've been to the best doctors in the world and I've spent almost half a million dollars and they're telling me I have symptoms of a P.O.W. and all I did was grow up in your home.'

I wasn't paraded around for sale at all. My mother wasn't into that.

My father was a very unhappy person, very sarcastic, and my mother was very nervous and worried about what people thought. They weren't monsters, but it wasn't a good childhood.

I grew up in a house of no love or emotion - it kind of sticks with you.

What must it be like for a little boy to read that daddy never loved mummy?

I hated my childhood. It was loathsome. My parents were deaf and dumb. Profoundly so. They could make noises when they were emotionally aroused, but they couldn't form it into speech.

Till I was 13, I thought my name was 'Shut Up.'

Childhood is so important. Without a loving one, you're vulnerable throughout your life. We're all the things our parents are - the good and the not so good. Thankfully, I have a wonderful wife who's a brilliant mother.

Divorce is, of course, difficult for a child. I didn't go through it as my parents stayed together, but I have a lot of friends who did.

My parents used to fight a lot, and I think they fought a lot at night, and they would turn the television up to hide the sound of their fighting.

The word 'divorce' wasn't foreign to me. As a child of the 1970s, I grew up as part of a generation of kids whose parents got divorced, and it wasn't seen as this terrible thing. Maybe that's why I believed what my father told me and Reina that day: that everything would be okay. But it wasn't.

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.

'Working Class Man' is my second memoir and is a continuation of my story from where 'Working Class Boy' left off. The book is really an attempt at explaining the impact of my childhood on myself and the ones I loved as an adult.

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.

A lot can happen [because of the dysfunctional family]. People don't look at that. They think, "Oh, my kids are going to be fine. My kids are resilient." But at a certain point, the damage starts. They start to feel pain - and when they feel bad, they start to take painkillers. We want to kill the pain.

I was a smart kid and I was not understood by my parents.

I can't imagine laying a finger on my kids. I go the other way and probably because my father was so abusive.