I’m often asked if I regret not going to Hollywood. I’m glad I didn’t go, because if I had I wouldn’t have my extended family, which is the fabric of my life. Only recently have I realised how special and unusual it is. 729
My daddy, Rev. A. D. King, my granddaddy, Martin Luther King, Senior – we are a family of faith, hope and love. 715
A close family member once offered his opinion that I exhibit the phone manners of a goat, then promptly withdrew the charge – out of fairness to goats. 717
Humans have a fraught relationship with beasts. They are our companions and our chattel, our family members and our laborers, our household pets and our household pests. We love them and cage them, admire them and abuse them. And, of course, we cook and eat them. 708
There’s a sort of sibling moratorium when you’re establishing yourself as an adult. So much of your energy has to be focused on other things like work and kids. But when people become more settled, siblings tend to regroup because now you’re building a new extended family. 712
It’s one of the worst-kept secrets of family life that all parents have a preferred son or daughter, and the rules for acknowledging it are the same everywhere: The favored kids recognize their status and keep quiet about it – the better to preserve the good thing they’ve got going and to keep their siblings off their back. 675
Spending $1 for a brand new house would feel very, very good. Spending $1,000 for a ham sandwich would feel very, very bad. Spending $19,000 for a small family car would feel, well, more or less right. But as with physical pain, fiscal pain can depend on the individual, and everyone has a different threshold. 731
There aren’t a lot of ironclad rules of family life, but here’s one: No matter how much your parents deny it – and here’s betting they deny it a lot – they have a favorite child. And if you’re a parent, so do you. 667
I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day. 665
‘American Horror’ is the debasement of the suburban family, the way a lonely kid would have imagined it in the Seventies. 713
We also knew it would be difficult, because of the financial condition of the family, for me to go to college. 700
It’s not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn’t have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn’t have much to do with reality. 718
No journalist has ever been in my house and no photographs have ever been taken of where I live. I don’t parade my family out for display, which is the way it will stay. 658
None of my actions have ever sort of been motored by the search for a husband or wondering if I was going to have a family someday or wanting to live in a really great house or thinking it would be really great to have a diamond. 653
Just call me a family man and an actor who digs his whole scene, side interests and all. Just say I feel mighty good at the ripe old age of 27. 694
