I love to cook, and I love to have all my family around the dinner table.
My parents discussed singing every night over the dinner table; I had a tremendous music education.
My parents were active in the anti-war movement in the 1960s, so I grew up with a tradition of civic activism around our dinner table and going to different marches for different causes.
We used to speak Irish – Gaelic Irish – around the dinner table, but over the years, we lost that.
I guess what really forms you as a person is what you do within your family to receive love or attention. In my family, what you had to do to receive attention was to have good conversation at the dinner table or for me to do well at school, and those were really my focuses because that was what was valued the most.
From the days when I was a kid, and I would sit at the dinner table with Dad, we would debate everything, from the best hamburger in the world to the most important news items. We always had real challenging conversations. That translated to hanging out with my buddies. It wasn’t always something cerebral or important.
My material is as new as anything on the dinner table. What difference does it make if I’m 70 or if I’m 20? The audience knows they aren’t getting any old stories from me.
Two of the central ingredients to our family are food and faith, so sitting down together and thanking God for the food He’s provided means everything to us. Prayer is a natural part of our lives – not only around the dinner table, but all day long.
Humor was a big part of my childhood. My family was full of comedians. We’d sit around the dinner table and try to one-up each other. It sometimes ended in tears, but usually in laughter.
My parents were the traditional Filipino parents who didn’t talk about money around the dinner table.
At the dinner table every night we pray together.
I always had amazing food around the dinner table, a beautiful house to live in, cool clothes to wear to school, and help with my homework. I am so lucky.
Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument.
I was always very interested in the storytelling decisions that went into directing. It just held this real allure for me. You know, if we’re doing a scene at a dinner table, they weren’t all shot the same. ‘Why was the camera here for one moment and there for another?’
My own kids were with me in Berlin when Germany was reunited, and they were with me in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed. We talked about these things at the dinner table, at their schools, with their friends.
Humor was a big part of my childhood. My family was full of comedians. We’d sit around the dinner table and try to one-up each other. It sometimes ended in tears, but usually in laughter.
I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we’re all the same.
When I look back on my childhood, my fondest memories are those surrounding the dinner table.
When I was younger – I don’t do this too much now – but sometimes if I couldn’t sleep, I would lie in bed and imagine all the characters I’ve played at a dinner table together.
The dinner table is a lively debate, and everybody weighs in in a different way. I like that, though.
I announced at the dinner table when I was 11 that I wanted to be a ballet dancer. But my goal changed to musical theater after the choreographer Robert Joffrey saw me perform while I was on scholarship at the San Francisco Ballet School.
The only newspaper in our house when I was growing up was the Daily Mail, and we would never have dreamt of discussing politics around the dinner table. So my involvement in politics came about through activism.
I received most of my business education around the dinner table. Whether I listened to my father or brothers, or we had business people as dinner guests, I learned from everyone.
There are directors who don’t cast you for the way you act but for the way you are, the way you behave around the dinner table.
In our family, we don’t know why there are so many of us in wrestling. We think about it at the dinner table when we have big family reunions, and it just comes from a passion and love we have for the industry.
I grew up in a kung fu house. It wasn’t until I got older that I discovered that most families didn’t talk about the Shaolin Temple or Jackie Chan at the dinner table.
I had the good fortune to spend hours with my parents around the dinner table having debates on politics and economics.
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