Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.
My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.
My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced.
I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.
I didn't feel particularly close to my father.
My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.
My father was the funniest man I ever met. He made Redd Foxx look like an undertaker.
My earliest childhood memory is of my father going crazy when the Giants won the World Series in 1954. He started whoopin' and hollerin' and jumpin' up and down all around the living room. I started crying because he scared me to death.
My father lived to be 97 and played bridge every day up to the end, so I've got a 50 percent chance of living a long life like him.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: