Family Anecdote Quotes

There was never any point in my life when I wasn't called Mr. Donen. I'm told my first words were, 'Call me Mr. Donen.' But I suspect that's apocryphal. My mother, Mrs. Donen, tended to exaggerate.

My grandma once told my mama, 'The kid's walking crazy around the cornfield, talking to himself.' I was calling ballgames.

Actually, Keke is my nickname. When I was little, my sister was about four years old, and she had an imaginary friend named Keke. And she wanted my name to be Keke.

I remember when I was a kid, every time the Beatles were on the radio, my dad would say he'd give me a dollar if I could tell him what band it was. So by the time I was about nine, I knew to just say 'The Beatles,' and I'd get a dollar out of it.

When my brother was a child, he kept telling my mom he wanted to be in the box. She didn't get it - he was two or three years old and kept saying he wanted to be in the box. She finally realized he was talking about the television.

My mother tells this joke about how when I was little I used to say, 'Mummy, all I want is a stable home!' and she'd reply, 'That's all right, darling, we'll buy you a stable.'

Some people think my father was a spy, because of working for that government agency in Vietnam, but he can't find his car keys, much less keep a national secret.

Sometimes I'll say, "I wrote that book," and the person will look at you as if you're really strange. One time that happened to my daughter on a plane. She was sitting next to a girl who was reading one of my books and my daughter said, "My mother wrote that book." And the girl started to quiz my daughter, asking her all sorts of questions, like what are the names of Judy's children and where did she grow up. My daughter thought it was so funny.

My mom, well, she's half Greek, half German-Italian; born in England. She's just a nomad. She loves Middle Eastern style, Indian style, so much so that she ended up having Indian babies.

My mother was the worst cook ever. In school, when we traded lunches, I had to throw in an article of clothing.

[My mother] once cooked a ham and later found it in my father's shirt drawer. I am not kidding.

...My sister Doreena who never lifted a royal finger growing up because she had the heart defect that we later found out was a fly on the X-ray machine.

As a kid, I can't remember having anything to play with except a loose tooth. And that wasn't mine. It was my brother's.

My sister, who is a wonderful and beautiful actress now, when she was 11 or 12, she would go out and take pictures of the punk parties in the desert. She used to have blue hair, and she got kicked out of Las Vegas Day School for having blue hair.

My mother missed having dinner with Lyndon Johnson because she couldn't find the right hat to wear. While my father went off to the white house to break bread with the President, my mother, who's not a things and stuff person, stayed at the hotel and tried on 10 different hats and missed dinner.

My dad is one of the funniest people I know. He's the sort of man who can make you laugh just by reading out of a telephone directory... He's a spastic.

My father would pass gas and then blame it on imaginary animals.

(My proudest moment as a child was the time I beat my uncle Pierre at Scrabble with the seven-letter word FARTING.)

My sister tells me I began singing before I could even talk. My first performance was of a song called 'My Blue Heaven,' which I began singing when I was a year and a half.

... my daughter McKenna thought I sang with the Everly Brothers ... I said, 'no I was one of the Righteous Brothers' and she said 'didn't they invent the airplane?'

When my nephew was 3 and 4, he would say the most genius things. He said, You're hammer macho with FBI dogs. I thought it was just one of those great lines.

I lived in an attached house. My father used to drive into the wrong driveway all the time. He'd say, Damn it, how do you tell one of these houses from another?

Basically, my mother couldn't hold a tune and when I was a baby, a rather tactless baby, I would ask her not to sing... you can't get to sleep if someone is singing off key nearby.

I was actually born in the front bedroom while my dad sat on the wall outside, feeling sick. Twenty minutes after my mother gave birth, she went downstairs and made my old man a cup of tea.

Well, in the beginning Tom and I were running around in identical things until we were six or seven years old, I think. We were wearing the same clothes.