At first it was my brother’s songwriting and I was just doing what everyone told me.
I figure I’ll be champ for about ten years and then I’ll let my brother take over – like the Kennedys down in Washington.
I would write scripts and little plays and perform them in the living room for my family when I was little with my brother until my mom said, ‘Alright, you need to go do it somewhere else other than the house.’
Arizona is the worst place to spend the summer – it’s like 125 degrees – so my mom, my brother and I would go to the beach for two months to escape the heat.
My mother and father, with my newborn brother and me in the backseat of the 1938 Ford sedan that would be our family car for the next decade, moved to that hastily constructed Army ammunition depot called Igloo, on the alkaline and sagebrush landscape of far southwestern South Dakota. I was three years old.
I’ve got a really great family round me, two sisters and an older brother and my mum and dad. Everybody’s equal.
I love being around my family. I am very close to my mum, my brother, my grandmother, my aunts – we constantly poke fun at each other, but it’s all done out of love.
I was totally dominated and revered my father. I admired everything he did. He was a great sports person. He loved me. I was his only boy at that time, before my brother Billy came along.
There are so many people I would love to work with, like Al Pacino, Paul Newman, Gary Oldman – maybe Tom Cruise. I wanna play his brother in something – so call my agent!
I had a simple goal in life: to be true to my parents and our country as an honorable son, a caring brother, and a good citizen.
I started acting when I was, like, three. My brother was really smart, and he wasn’t being challenged enough, so my mom put him in the theater class. And I obviously followed him.
Well, when you’re the youngest of five, parents kind of lose interest more and more through the children. I think my eldest brother was under loads of pressure to do something amazing with his life, but by the time I came around they were like, ‘Well, let’s hope he doesn’t kill a guy.’
My father gave me formal education in raagdari. He died in Lahore in 1964 when I was 13. I was in the tenth year of school, and my father’s brother took me into the qawwali ensemble and started giving me formal education in qawwali.
My mom is just someone who’s easy to talk to and hang with. My sister, it’s always cool to be able to help her out with things. My brother is fun when we’re just joking and messing around. And my dad is someone who’s helpful with my music and easy to talk to about that stuff because he understands me in that sense.
‘Macbeth’ was the first play I ever read. In fact, I remember my brother Tom, who is six years older than me, coming home from school and telling me about it. He was the one that really got me going.
I have an older brother who is 21 and attends UC Berkley.
But for me it’s loads of pressure. Like, my mum is a strong independent woman, but obviously she relies on me a little bit. My little brother has his own job but he relies on me.
My brother is really, really slow.
My dad and my brother have Google alerts out on me.
I went to Amherst because my brother had gone there before me, and he went there because his guidance counselor thought that we would do better there than at a large university like Harvard.
I played some ping pong with the guys on the T’Wolves team. I might have been the champ on that team, too. But ping pong is a big part of my life. I grew up playing it against my brother and my father when I was young. They used to kick my behind for a long time, so I got very good at it.
My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been thirty-one. Then there was my twin brother and my sister. We had two aunts as well, my father’s sisters. But the immediate family consisted of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me.
My favorite Oscar story was a year my brother had been nominated, my whole family went.
People go back to the stuff that doesn’t cost a lot of money and the stuff that you don’t have to hand money to over and over again. Stuff that you get for free, stuff that your older brother gives you, stuff that you can get out of the local library.
My brother arrived some months after my father left. Um, and he ah, was thus eight years younger than me and it was um, you know, it was such a time that my mother probably had people wondering was it his.
I have a dream of re-creating the fantastic family I grew up in with my brother and my parents. I am lucky that I have such a good image of family life – my father and mother are still in love, still happy.
My mother didn’t want me to be in fashion. She was in the fashion business, so was my brother, and she thought it was too crazy for me. She wanted me to be married with children, to be independent, yes, but not to have a crazy life.
My brother was very important to me. And he played guitar. So that’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a guitar player. So he was the first one to inspire me to do something with my life. And I was so glad that he was there.
Three years into getting ‘The Witch’ financed, I was hanging out with my brother and he was like, ‘I’m working on this script. It’s a ghost story in a lighthouse.’ I thought, ‘Damn, that’s a really good idea, I wish I’d had it.’
My mother, Anne, was a cleaner and a shopkeeper. Out of economic necessity she had to hold down two jobs and she would take me and my older sisters, Dawn and Joanna, and my younger brother, David, with her when she cleaned houses.
Kissing Macaulay Culkin was like kissing a brother. It was really no big deal.
As fire kindled by fire, so is the poet’s mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.
Daniel, my big brother, is eight years older. I’m lucky he didn’t mind hanging out with his little sister and my younger brother.
Life is precious, and when someone dies it’s an opportunity to realise how precious it is. My brother drowned when I was 17. He was 15. I think I grew from that. My father didn’t. It really crushed him.
When I was a kid, I was surrounded by girls: older sisters, older girl cousins just down the street… except for an older boy named Vito who threw rocks. Each year I would wish for a baby brother. It never happened.
We did a two month tour with Taj Mahal that was really healing and cathartic and a good distraction after my brother passed away. Then I knew I wanted to take a year off, and it was really nice to have that chance to fall apart.
I dropped out of school after my tenth standard. But both my elder brother and younger brother are highly educated.
My brother always teases me about my forehead: ‘I could eat off it!’
My dad was a keen cricketer – he played at school and club level – but it was hard for him to find time for it because he was a farmer, so he encouraged me and my brother.
My brother and I are best friends.
I appreciate my brother, His Highness Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the U.A.E. and Ruler of Dubai, and the Council of Ministers, who face every morning challenges, but plan and remove all obstacles to score achievements.
My mum is a social worker and my dad’s a roofer. My brother Nicky and I were the first two in my family to go to university.
I recently saw this home video where my brother is playing this character Arsenio Grimley, who is a mix of Arsenio Hall and Ed Grimley – which, clearly, is my parents’ doing, because he’s, like, 10. He’s the host, I’m every guest, and then my dad is Elton John. That was a Saturday night.
My mother worked in advertising and my father was a journalist. But they split up when I was three and I grew up in a single-parent family. My mum brought my brother and I up.
We got to go to Lucas Ranch and, at that time, my brother was still living in a condo about a mile from Robin Williams, and so I made all of the other comics jealous because I got to get a ride home with him.
Not that I regret saying what I believed to be the truth, but I regret anything that I might have written or spoken that could have been used in a way to help to foster that atmosphere out of which came the loss of life of Brother Malcolm.
Growing up, we didn’t have anything. My mum wasn’t well, so I was in three care homes then foster homes before me and my little brother went back to her. I was passed from pillar to post.
My father was a really sharp cartoonist and filmmaker. He used to tape-record the family surreptitiously, either while we were driving around or at dinner, and in 1963 he and I made up a story about a brother and a sister, Lisa and Matt, having an adventure out in the woods with animals.
Language is political. That’s why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that’s why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.
If thy brother wrongs thee, remember not so much his wrong-doing, but more than ever that he is thy brother.
I went through a lot of bullying early on. Girls made my life a living hell. We had come to America from a different country. My brother and I had accents. It was very tough.
We are commanded to seek out those who are lost. We are to be our brother’s keeper.
