My grandmother was sick and I was told that we could not tell her, and that my cousin was gonna have this wedding as an excuse for us to all go and see her. And I think that I was just so frustrated by the situation.

I'm still waiting for someone to call me to cater their wedding. But that's gonna cost you. If you want my cousin Jerez to play the sax, that's going to cost you a little more. The sky's the limit after that.

Yes, I travel in unusual circles. George Osborne and his wife Frances are my cousins.

Every Thanksgiving, we visited our New York cousins and went shopping at Bergdorf's and Saks for long dresses to wear to the Homestead for New Year's Eve.

Once, at Thanksgiving, a neighbor wandered in while my cousin Lisa worked on a turkey, shearing meat off its frame and sliding the steaming slices onto a big flowered plate. 'Hey, that's the man's job,' she yelped, in between slurps of her Big Gulp. No one even paused to acknowledge the comment; everyone just laughed and laughed.

The biggest piece is my family... From watching films like The Godfather on our dining room wall, to having a great relationship with my sibling. Or going on weekend trips with our cousins to the beach and eating all day... it's been a crazy childhood; a 'bohemian one'.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

You know, all my songs are relatives, brothers, sisters, cousins.

When I was 10 years old, a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school. And as a special treat, he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands. And there it was, the seat of human consciousness, the powerhouse of the human body, sitting in my hands.

I was glad to hear of that determination as I detest the practice of cousins marrying or any marriage between persons in which there can be traced the most distant relationship. I go for the improvement instead of the deterioration of our race.

My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.

Ian Fleming was my cousin, you know. He was in naval intelligence.

I'm a big fan of gallows humor. When my aunt passed away, she was in a coma for a day before my cousins pulled the plug. And the amount of joking and base humor that went on that day around her bed was so insane. It's crazy how people talk when something horrible is happening.

I was in New York City and my sister and cousin came out to see me, and I brought a guitar on stage. But all the audience wanted was for me to play so they weren't listing to anything I was saying, I bombed hard. On the cab ride home, my sister pulled a sticker off the cab and put it on my guitar which I still have today in my man cave.

On the Italian side, we can trace the family back 2,000 years. I have a cousin in Rome, a famous archaeologist, Count Andrea Carandini, who was in Lombardy and came across some pottery with the original name of the family, Carandinus, painted on it.

I did grow up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, around a lot of my mom's family. I had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles around me, and my sisters and my brother. Probably the most formative part of it was that we grew up on the edge of a forest. It wasn't a big forest, but it was enough. When you're a kid, it feels gigantic.

The family that brunches together stays together. My cousins and I swear by this rule, and Sunday brunch with them is like a detox session.

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

In our family, and not just us but even with my cousins, uncles and aunts, we celebrate every festival - be it Christmas, Easter, Eid, Diwali or our birthdays.

A strangely reflective, even melancholy day. Is that because, unlike our cousins in the northern hemisphere, Easter is not associated with the energy and vitality of spring but with the more subdued spirit of autumn?

When I was growing up, all my cousins had high-top fades. I thought it would be cool to see how long I could grow a high-top.

Growing up in a Singaporean Chinese family, for me food is almost the primary means of communication between family members, both immediate and extended... hey, it beats discussing which cousin did better at end of semester exams, or who's getting married next, right?

One Christmas, I wrote a nativity play. But nobody turned up on the day of the performance apart from my brother and my cousins, so I just read the whole script onstage and made my brother pretend to be one of the animals at the inn.

When I was young, we always went to our posh cousins at Christmas. My dad made sure we had new shoes and clean clothes - he was really proud - and that's why I felt different from everyone living around me. We had the first television on the estate, the first fridge.