Quincy Jones Quotes

My mom was my mother and father. My father lost his mind when I was about 4 years old. And my mom did everything she could to make sure that we was brought up right.

I had a pretty rough childhood. I was raised for a few years by my single mom, until she married my stepdad a little later.

It's a long story, my life, growing up with my dad, my mom when she died, everything. I had bad moments in my life, my dad going to prison, I had nothing, and that's where I got my motivation.

I've seen the best and worst of times. My parents were divorced when I was a child. I was brought up by my father.

I was a product of a divorced family and I used humor as a weapon to combat sadness. I used comedy to make my mother laugh in light of the darkness that she faced, and to me it became a very powerful tool at a very young age, at six. I saw how therapeutic it could be.

I grew up in the Fifties, and the majority of people in my class had fathers living at home. I was very aware that I was in the minority. I had a foreign name, and my daddy didn't come and pick me up from school. I felt like an outsider, which probably helped me as an actress.

When I was seven my parents divorced. My father went to Dallas. My mom fled to the shelter of my grandparents in a strange central Ohio town of 22,000, Wooster. When it looked like I was growing up to be a wimp I was forced to live with my father, which I did not want to do.

My father was in and out of jail throughout my childhood. He really wasn't in my life at all. Thankfully, I had two strong role models who guided me through those years.

My mum and dad split up when I was five years old, and that was quite upsetting. But ever since then, I've been very hard.

When I was growing up as a kid, it was always, 'Oh, you're being bullied. Well, toughen up. Get some tough skin and deal with it.' That's how we were told to deal with it, and it's not that simple.

Because I grew up in a single parent home with my mom, growing up, things weren't always the best.

My parents were very young when they had me. They were still growing up and learning themselves. They did the best they could, but my mom and dad split up when I was little... So that kind of made me stronger.

I don't remember the first half of my life. All I say is a happy childhood is the worst possible preparation for life.

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

I mean, when you grow up in the inner city and you grow up in a single-parent household, that's - those are humbling times, you know?

I was six when my parents divorced, and that was tough for me.

My parents' divorce made an important change in my life. It affected me. After that, when I can't play Wimbledon, it was tough. For one month I was outside the world.

An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.

I suppose the first big shift in my life was when, at the age of 8, my father left my mother, leaving her alone with two daughters to bring up. That taught me the importance of women being financially independent. You never know what might happen.

My own parents divorced when I was six. I was raised with my brother Joel by our mother on the East Coast, visiting my father in Los Angeles during holidays. When your parents are divorced, you don't know anything else, do you?

I think every family is dysfunctional, and some manage to control it better than others.

The fact that I didn't have a mom is a challenge; it was a struggle; and we made the best of it, and because of that my relationship with my dad is that much stronger.

I used to have seizures when I was young. My mother and father didn't know what to do or how to handle it but they did the best they could with what little they had.

All my life, I had this idea that if I could unravel the mystery that was my mother, then I could help save her. But it didn't really work. We were close, but she struggled with mental illness and alcoholism, and it was rough at times.

Stasis is something that has marked my life since I was a boy growing up in Pittsburgh with my mother. It was the natural state that we existed in. For one thing, she suffered from a debilitating depression throughout my childhood, and depression is nothing if not static.