Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Then my mother was taken ill and died and my father took me to St. Mary's.
My father, obviously, and my mother were inspirations. My uncle, Frank Harper, he was an absolute mentor for me.
My mother told me once that she and my father agreed that I would not be brought up Jewish in Chicago. She had me going to a Methodist church.
Growing up, my father coached my basketball team, and my mother drove me into St. Louis for various rehearsals between musical productions and Radio Disney.
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.
I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.