I don't forget my roots. My father was an emigrant from Italy who worked in a steel factory. My mother worked part-time. When my father came home she would go out to work, cleaning offices.
My father worked in a tyre factory. My mother worked as a teacher.
All my family worked for Puma. My mother worked there, and my father was the guy that opened and closed up in the evening. We lived in the neighbouring building - just a couple of steps, and I would be in the Puma factory. All 300 people that worked there knew me; it was my adventure playground. I knew everything, even how to make a shoe sole.
My mother worked in a cookie factory. My father worked in a factory. So anyone that dares begrudge what I have, just better get off their duff and do something about it to do something for themselves as well as their country. I feel that I have a perfect right to spend my money the way I damn please.
We lived above my father's launderette. Both my parents ran the launderette, but my father was also a factory supervisor, and my mum worked part-time in an accounts office.
My mother was madly adventurous. My father was an actor - he worked with Gielgud - and my mother came from a very wealthy family. She definitely wasn't meant to marry an actor, but she eloped with him one lunch-time.
So when the book came out, my mother stunned us all by leaving my father. I think three months before the book came out, she left my father the day he retired from the Marine Corps. They had a parade and march, and she came home and left.
My father was one of 11. He was an attorney. My mother worked for the Syracuse newspaper as a columnist before she became a stay-at-home mother.
My father was what you would call a cowboy, a vaquero; he worked out in the ranches with cattle. And my mother came from farmers down in the valley.
I came from a very, very small valley in the middle of South Wales. I grew up there with my father, who's a coal miner, and my mother worked in a normal factory.
I was the first son and first child. When my sister came along, well, she was two years younger, and I had to go to the golf course because my mother couldn't handle all the action going on. So I came with father to the golf course since I was a year and a half old and I spent the day with him here, and it worked in naturally. And it was fun for me being with my father, and doing things that a kid did it was great.
I believe the person who was out conquering the world, who was out fighting in the world were our fathers, so to have them come... I adored my father more than anyone in the world, but my father had more advice on work policies and how to get a job and how to survive in the work environment than my mother because my mother never worked outside of the home. So I think the support of fathers is very important.
My parents were very religious. My mother came from Co Donegal to work in the shirt factory in Derry when she met my father.
When my father left us, my mother went back to school immediately. She went to school in the day while we were at school, and she worked at night. She worked very hard to never let someone define her as a victim or a failure.
Oddly enough, my mother was born in Southampton. I have roots in Southampton, Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor. My grandfather, her father, Stefano Rullo, when he came from Naples, he went to Pennsylvania and worked coal mines.
My mother - both my mother and father had very successful careers. My mother's an English professor and my father is a scientist and physician. They worked at the same jobs for their entire life, 50 years each.
My grandfather worked in a shoe factory - he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family.