A Quote by David Harsanyi

As with most people, my ideology and my attitudes about life were informed by parents and family. — © David Harsanyi
As with most people, my ideology and my attitudes about life were informed by parents and family.
The strange thing about my life is that I came to America at about the time when racial attitudes were changing. This was a big help to me. Also, the people who were most cruel to me when I first came to America were black Americans. They made absolute fun of the way I talked, the way I dressed. I couldn't dance. The people who were most kind and loving to me were white people. So what can one make of that? Perhaps it was a coincidence that all the people who found me strange were black and all the people who didn't were white.
I guess that my opinion of writing about real people is informed by defenses of Joyce Maynard's memoir, that the experiences were a part of my life as well, and that I have the right to write about my life.
Happy Days was about a family... although the show was shot in the 70s, it was about a family in the 50s. I realized that kids were watching their parents grow up and the parents were watching themselves grow up. That was the key to the success of our show.
The Columbia years are the most sentimental for me. My parents were together through most of that time and we were a happy, sort of normal family.
I'm most proud of my kids, for one, and my family and my parents. Outside of that - what am I proud of? I don't know. I don't look back, I just go forward. I'm just proud of the fact that my parents were immigrants and we had nearly nothing, and all of the sudden, with the help of a lot of people and my parents as a model, I amounted to something. And I'm doing some very decent work.
People have a comic bent or an angularity to their thinking, and those are the people who make jokes. And it's usually people who were in an environment, when they were young, where jokes were at a premium, or at least considered important to a life. My parents always listened to the comedy radio shows, we went to the comedy movies, and my parents appreciated comedy. So kids listen and follow what their parents like.
I come from a family of working people. My parents were Guatemalan immigrants who spent most of their lives in the service industry.
What interested me most about the Kennedys was the family situation. Somehow, they had created this family that lasted over time, they had a sense of connection to one another. Especially now, when people are spread all over the country and they don't see grandparents and parents, this family bonded together.
Parents typically don't talk to each other about their goals and attitudes to parenting but this type of conversation could be very useful for helping parents become clearer about the things that are important to them.
When I was a kid people always asked why I didn't act like the rest of my family, and parents would say, "Well, she needs a childhood! We would never allow her to do that even if she wanted to". They were as involved in my life as any parents are in any person's life.
I was brought up to believe that it's family first. Of all the people my parents knew, the family was most important. You always turn to your family, and the family supports you. We do what we can to support our young and go and see the grandchildren if they're doing plays at school and their sports events.
You know, people see [August: Osage County], and I tell them that it's based on my family, and they assume that I came from some kind of horrible, hysterical circumstances. That's not true. My family, my nuclear family, was actually very close. My mom and dad were great parents and they encouraged a real rich, creative life for me and my brothers. My extended family, like every family, has some darkness, and some violence of some kind, emotional or otherwise, in their past.
The four of us enjoyed a most wonderful family atmosphere filled with love and reciprocal devotion. Both parents were highly cultured and instilled in us their high appreciation of intellectual pursuit. It was, however, a typical Victorian style of life, all decisions being taken by the head of the family, the husband and father.
I come from a performing family. My parents are Nigerian, and their parents and their parents - and it's all about performance in their culture, you know. The music. The dancing... you're told to stand out at family gatherings and perform in some sort of way. You're just kind of born into it.
I'm really connected to people, and my relationships with people are paramount, so I write about relationships, particularly strong female ones. In my family, there were six girls born in five years. We were best friends. And my parents raised all of us as first-class citizens.
I've had a family my entire adult life; I started raising kids when I was 21. I suspect that being part of a family has probably informed my life as a writer as much as anything else has.
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