Neal Brennan Quotes

My dad was depressed a lot of the time, and there were a lot of things in his life that he never resolved.

When I was a child, I used to cry all the time.

I had trained myself not to go to the bathroom throughout my elementary and junior high school years because I was bullied. And you don't understand why you're being bullied, so you just suppress it.

I always wondered what it would be like to have a normal childhood.

My childhood was so traumatic.

I had a real bad attitude after my dad passed of liver cancer. I was 9, and we were really close.

Cancer is awful. It took 10 years until I didn't think about it every day. Nobody should go through this. Nobody.

I thought about dying whenever I got bad news about other people.

My mom died of cancer when I was really young. I'm not someone who tries to work out their own stuff with a role, but I think that happened despite my best efforts to keep myself separate from it.

For the first five years of my life, things felt pretty good. A lot went wrong after that, family-wise.

I have irrational fears, and they all go back to losing my father as a kid. I've never gotten over it.

It eats you up. It eats you up. And you have to - I had a lot of help. I had a lot of therapy. And I was able to - because it was hard, you know, to - you can't just lay it on friends and children.

I think my biggest focus for myself is learning how to continue to get through the trauma that my father has caused in my life.

My mother said I was a clingy kid until I was about four. I also remember that from the age of eight she and I fought almost every day.

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

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.

At some stages of your life you will deal with things and at others you are overwhelmed with misery and anxiety.

I had a lot of anger because I wasn't happy with the way I had been raised.

Lorna was quite young when her mother died, and I think she's blocked out some of the memories. I talked to her a little bit about that, but I wasn't prepared to go around and poke and hurt her.

I wanted to have a normal childhood. Normal relationships.

I probably only cried five or six times in my life and I think four of those times was from my daddy kicking my butt.

I think that when something happens when you're growing up, like a death or divorce, it does open the world slightly because things aren't as straightforward.

Last time I spoke to my mom she called me from a pay phone, and we didn't have the best talk. Ever since my stepdad passed away three years ago, she has been very depressed and hasn't been herself at all.

I think losing your mother at such a young age does end up shaping your life massively. Of course it does, and now I find myself trying to be there and give advice to other people who are in similar positions.