I'd love to paint our roof white - it's so hot down here in Texas! - and I'd love to have a rainwater collection system to save rain runoff for later. I also love to fantasize about keeping chickens in the backyard.

I think about my dwindling anonymity, and that's really scary because a very large part of me would be perfectly happy living on a ranch in Colorado and having babies and chickens and horses - which I will do anyway.

When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.

I volunteered on a farming community in Israel for two years when I was a teenager. One of the jobs involved clearing out a massive warehouse full of chickens ready for the abattoir. The smell of 40,000 chickens in 45C is awful.

Our family always rescued animals from local shelters or from the street or from someone who didn't want their animal. We always had a dog in our house. We usually had two cats. We had guinea pigs and little chicks and chickens.

We are a family that lives probably 90 percent on wild game. We're certainly working our way toward 100 percent self-sufficient. Looking to raise chickens for eggs, things of that nature, start a garden. We enjoy the simple life.

'You have chickens?' That's what nearly everyone asks next, after they find out about our family pets. They just need to make sure they heard me correctly. Perhaps it's because I don't come across to most as a rural-loving farm girl.

As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I'd put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn't actually know how to write.

There's a character I played in 'Love in a Cold Climate' - very like my mother. I asked if I could wear a man's shoes and hat to feed the chickens: all things from her. In fact, every part I play has got an enormous amount of her in it.

My parents made no money whatsoever, but they really knew how to see, as artists. So a big adventure might be, on a hot, dreadful day with no place to go, to go out and draw our chickens with pastels. My parents gave me a sense of wonder.

The happiest moments of my childhood were spent on my grandmother's front porch in Durham, N.C., or at her sister's farmhouse in Orange County, where chickens paraded outside the kitchen's screen door and hams were cured in the smokehouse.

The smaller a group, the easier it is for more people to argue and enter into discussions. The U.S. is vast. It's too large. The intellectuals hide out in enclaves, in big cities or universities, like a bunch of chickens hiding from a fox.

I'm not a Luddite, but I'm outside more than I'm on my computer. We have a micro-farm - it's a step up from a garden. We have a pretty extensive vineyard. We grow about 60 percent of our own food, make our own wine, have chickens for eggs.

Scientists suggest that the link between consuming poultry and cancer spread may be due to carcinogens in cooked meat. For unknown reasons, these carcinogens build up more in the muscles of chickens and turkeys than in those of other animals.

I get up around 8 o'clock, which gives me enough time to walk dogs and feed chickens and horses. Then I get to work in my home office upstairs, and basically, I don't stop until I've written 2,000 words and/or the Stephen Colbert show is over.

We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.

They've made it a felon to drive from Florida to Louisiana with any fighting birds, so I've had to get rid of most of my chickens. I only got about a hundred left now, which I just keep for colour and breeding. I love those birds as much as anything.

I grew up in poverty on the edge of a golf course. I saw how people lived on the other side of the tracks, the upper crust and the WASPs at the country club. We had chickens and pigs in our yards. We butchered every year. I'll never forget those things.

I know that organic farms can be industrial and just as large and impersonal as conventional farms. Sometimes the free-range chickens aren't even allowed outside, and so they cluck-walk packed tight in a dim lit barn. But organic farms use fewer chemicals.

I spent a lot of time on farms when I was growing up, and I've been obsessed with the practical logic of farmyards - the turning radius of tractors, where the chickens and ducks might go. It's not a place where stand-alone aesthetic decisions make a lot of sense.

I've always had that attitude about my career: it's something that I do, but it's not my whole life. I have a real life, a personal life: I've got a lot of chickens, I've got a horse, I've got a kitty-cat, I've got a lot of goats, I've got animals all over the place.

Rush Limbaugh is a lame professional swine, and he makes a good living at it. He is like a hired geek in some traveling backwoods carnival - the freaks who bite the heads off chickens - but Limbaugh is a modernized geek who thinks he can bite the heads off of people.

I grew up in a farming family. I hated cleaning out the chickens but loved hatching them and feeding the new born sheep. The smell of hot milk still has a special resonance for me. Harvest was back-breaking work, though... Where do you think Jesus got his biceps from?

In England, you might have a possession game of six v. six, and it's like headless chickens: people running around everywhere just trying to keep the ball and be strong in tackles. But in Spain, you always stay in your position. You're still in your shape for every drill.

You know, I remember Career Day in high school. I remember plumbers and lawyers... I don't remember a booth where you could sign up to learn how to shoot chickens out of a cannon at the windshield of an airplane, 'cause there would have been a line at my school to do that!

It was a small farm in a little rural town by the Indiana state border. I lived there from ages 5 to 12, I would say, before we moved to Dallas. We had chickens and a vegetable garden, and I had to get up to milk the goats at seven in the morning or do it at seven at night.

I grew up on a working farm. It was small, a hundred acres, but we had cows and pigs and chickens and sheep and a vegetable garden. I spent hours pulling weeds, hoeing, feeding the horses, cleaning out the stalls. My dad was a tough taskmaster. I always worked, but we also had fun.

The first time I was cooking for my wife, Stephanie, way before she was my wife, I actually put three chickens on the rotisserie and I closed the grill, which is really a bad idea. But I just wasn't thinking very straight that day. And I looked outside and I saw, like, smoke and flames.

I bought a place in Milan, but Missoni headquarters are out in the country, in Sumirago. My whole family eats out of the same vegetable garden; my mother raises chickens. I love the city, but if you're always bombarded with stimulation, you get numb to it. I need to get bored to create.

The living werewolves have genuine needs and desires, which, though they may oppose ours, are valid. Even if they want to eat humans, you can't really call them evil, any more than mice can call cats evil, or chickens can call humans evil. It's all just a matter of where you're standing.

The present Arab uprising didn't stem from Israel. The old guard is trying to keep down the young chickens. The old guard is better organized. They may win elections, but unless they have a solution to poverty, to corruption, to oppression, they will not last. I am with the young people.

My grandmother had a courtyard of animals, like goats and chickens. She made ricotta cheese, cooked with potatoes warm from the garden, grew everything from beans to wheat. It was simple, seasonal food, and we all ate what was produced 10 miles from where we lived. It was that way for centuries.

When I started researching the eco effects of eating meat, I'd assumed, for no good reason, that environmental irresponsibility would correspond to both animal size and deliciousness: Eating cows would be worst, eating pigs would be a bit less bad, and eating chickens would be basically harmless.

I used to carbo load. But then I ran my first marathon, actually on a whim. All I could think of was that I needed protein. I remember going to the grocery store and buying one of those roasted chickens. I remember downing a bunch of that and, yes, I had some carbs, but that's what I felt I needed.

We have some goats, some chickens, and we used to have pigs. There used to be two ostriches as well, but they were a little bit violent, so we had to give them away. When we were little, we used to play with the goats all the time. We each had our own little goat, and we'd go and run around with them.

I love to get on the road, but I also think arriving is such a thrill. Turning up at the train station in Mumbai, for example, to see people hanging off all the wonderful old carriages. It's extraordinary - everyone sitting with their chickens on their laps, moving forward but not going anywhere fast.

So, I'm on 'Sesame Street,' walking around with all these monsters, Elmo and his buddies, a whole bunch of chickens, a whole bunch of penguins and a number four dancing about. It was just pure joy, simple, ridiculous fun, stupid joy. There's no irony. 'Sesame Street' is just a crazy great place to be.

I'm amazed now whenever I go back to London. I'm like, 'Wow. I used to kind of swing up these streets when I knew how this machine worked.' And then when you don't, you lose that. You need to get your license back. I do know how to plant a garden and keep chickens, but I don't know how to do much else.

We had our wheat. We made our own olive oil. We made our wine. We had chickens, ducks; we had sheep, cows, milk. So I was raised in a very simple situation but understanding really food from the ground... the essence of food and the flavors. And those memories I took with me, and I think that they lingered on.

People imagine that there are rituals, like lighting candles or sacrificing chickens. They really just want to know what the magic formula is for writing. I inevitably disappoint them by saying you just put your butt in the chair, and you write 500 words a day, and then you get up and repeat it the next morning.

Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.

Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves. They made shoes, plucked chickens, or created value in some way for other people, who then traded or paid for those goods and services.

I'm a huge supporter of animal rights - and I've been an outspoken critic of the cruelties routinely inflicted on livestock at factory farms. But it really bothers me that the mistreatment of pigs and chickens and cows seems to attract a lot more attention and spark a lot more outrage than the abuse of immigrant workers.

Way back in the 1970s, I was eating a steak, and I looked down, and for the first time it suddenly looked like flesh to me - like a dead creature. In a flash, I realized that every time I ate any kind of meat, something had been killed for me, and I stopped eating all animals, not just cows and pigs but chickens and fish.

My parents taught me to be optimistic and independent. They made me feel that I could do anything I set my mind to, which has really helped me. They didn't make allowances for me because of my height. I had to do everything my brother and sister had to do, including raising our animal menagerie that included cows and chickens.

When I was little, we lived on 8 acres and my mom had a horse. But when I was 7, my mom kicked my dad out, and then in order to feed us five kids, she got critters cheap or for free and raised them for food. We milked a cow, raised chickens, pigs and beef cattle. We heated our one-story house with wood and stayed cold all winter.

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