I'm considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family - father mother children - is fundamental to our civilisation.

I'm a strange mixture of my mother's curiosity my father who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility and my mother's father who was always in trouble with gambling debts.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible.

My mother was passionate. She was stubborn the dominant one in the family. She dominated my father.

If you go from a structure where you have the support and that partner and that construction of a family and that's broken apart I think that's probably a lot harder than always being a single mom and having the father being a support in another area.

We really were a very musical family. Father managed to buy us a small pump organ and I just loved this instrument.

My father never talked about the sacrifices that the family made for me.

I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist the solo flute for Toscanini.

Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there.

I don't hide my feelings but when it comes to illness I guess I don't panic. My father was the same way. I'm the provider for the family and the caretaker. If I panic who is anybody going to run to?

My grandfather's family used to own a pasta factory in Naples and they would go door-to-door selling their pasta. So his love of food came from his parents which was then passed down to my mother and then again to me.

My father was the center of the family and everyone tried to please him.

My mother at least twice cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on because she was so mad about its treatment of my father.

I think my father would have liked to have been an artist actually. But I think he didn't quite have perhaps the drive or I don't know I mean he had a family to bring up I suppose.

I'm a strong person I'm a strong family man I'm a strong husband and a strong father.

My parents were drawn to the idea that there was space and opportunity in Australia. For the meagre sum of £10 you could sail your entire family out to Australia so that's what my father chose to do.

A lot of what I'm obsessed with is the relationship and the dynamics between people and the family particularly brothers and their father.

Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.

There are no adequate substitutes for father mother and children bound together in a loving commitment to nurture and protect. No government no matter how well-intentioned can take the place of the family in the scheme of things.

My father was brought up in an orphanage in the Catskills. He was a factory worker. And because his family wasn't there for him family was everything. We could disagree inside the house but outside the house it was us against the world. So when I became a drag actor he looked sideways but said okay.

All the laws and legislation in the world will never heal this world like the loving hearts and arms of mothers and fathers. If every child could drift to sleep feeling wrapped in the love of their family - and God's love - this world would be a far more gentle and better place.

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.

Like all my family and class I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.

There are things that you cannot talk to your mother and father about there are things that you cannot talk to your children about.