I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that, geographically, he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer.

Now we Democrats believe that America is still the country of fair play, that we can come out of a small town or a poor neighborhood and have the same chance as anyone else, and it doesn't matter whether we are black or Hispanic, or disabled or women.

I'm in awe of people like Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard; they're great musicians and people. But I'm most starstruck by people in the small town where I live. Especially single dads, like me, who are working five times as hard to raise their kids.

Baltimore was like a small town when I got there - the Colts, the Orioles, guys like Frank Robinson, we all knew and respected each other. Everyone would cross paths at one point at Lenny Moore's Sportsman's Lounge, trading stories and having some fun.

I am from a really small town where theater wasn't super-cool, I would say. Maybe undervalued? So, I would drive into St. Louis, where it was cool. I would go to these all-boy schools where they needed girls in their shows, and I would do my shows there.

Tyrone, I think they're taking to festivals. I don't know which festivals it will be at. It's like a buddy picture. It's a couple of guys driving across the country and they get to a small town and they hit a guy. The guy turns out to be a drug smuggler.

As a native of Parsons, Kansas, a small town near the Oklahoma border, I have a deep respect for tribal nations in Oklahoma. But this federal spending in Oklahoma is outrageous. And excessive subsidies have made the state a playground for Lifeline fraud.

I've been a Leeds fan for as long as I can remember. When you are about five or six, you adopt a team - obviously, I didn't grow up in Leeds. I grew up in a small town on the Irish border, and most of the people my age were Leeds fans, both then and now.

A lot of stuff doesn't faze me. I think it's because I was brought up in a small town, and normally, when you're from a small town, when you see a famous person, you'd be like, 'Oh my god. This never happens,' but I've always kind of been like nonchalant.

I'm a kid who grew up in a small town and started acting when he was seven for no reason and got lucky. Sometimes it can be a little overwhelming. I feel like some people, especially child stars, act out because they don't know how to handle the pressure.

Every child in every country in every small town should know who I am. There are a handful of people who have achieved that, and two of them are my idols Michael Jackson and Bruce Lee. I'd like to get to that level someday and touch as many lives as I can.

I had a great career, to go from a small town in Switzerland to play for the Italian national team was a dream come true. So was playing for Lazio and Chelsea, winning trophies. When I look back I am very grateful for what I had, rather than what I missed.

My first record was made in Termonfeckin, which is a small town on the north-east coast of Ireland. I had been in London, but it didn't click. So, at home, I didn't think about making something, just whether something could be made. There was no grand plan.

I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel.

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.

My background is a small town with no movie theater. So... I always pictured myself onstage. I went to acting school and learned all the skills. I left early because I did my first movie and discovered that I really loved the minimalistic work with the camera.

I grew up in a small town in the woods of Estonia, and there was not much else around me besides nature. It was stunning, but I dreamt of meeting eccentric people and going exciting places. Music became my escape. I thought if I got good enough, I could leave.

My love of movies started when I was 7 years old, living in a small town, going to the movies all the time, and finding the people in the movies more interesting than the people in my small town. Also, at that time, it wasn't that easy to find out about movies.

'Mercury' is about a big company exploiting a small town. There is a place in Tamil Nadu called Kodaikanal. It had a thermometer factory, which would dump the mercury into the river. This affected a lot of people. This incident is the inspiration for this film.

Rock and roll is about desire, about wanting something better. I think my characters all want something better. My understanding of the rock and roll dream is that a kid in an isolated place or a small town or an underprivileged world could transcend it somehow.

I get this anxiety in cities and places like that. When you grow up in kind of a small town and when you grow up around a lot of green and trees and nature and that sort of thing, sometimes I think it's a little mentally disconcerting to be around this concrete.

If you're an Afghan village leader in a small town down around Kandahar somewhere, and you know that the footprint is getting smaller for your security, and the Taliban saying don't forget, I'm going to be back real soon, who is your loyalty going to go through?

I have always been 'small town.' I was born outside of Philadelphia, so we lived on a 20-acre farm and then spent two years in a log cabin on the Appalachian Trail. We lived outside of York in Red Lion, which is an amazing town. It's perpetually 1982 in that town.

The workplace can be a good place to find opportunities to socialise, but what if you don't meet any like-minded people there, or what if you work alone? Is it, somewhat counter-intuitively, easier to find yourself lonely in a city than in a small town or village?

I kept saying that I'd never live in L.A., and I didn't think I would. But that's where the work is, and I ended up making a lot of friends there, and my old friends moved out to Los Angeles too. And also, I think when you're famous, its hard to live in a small town.

I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town.

I sort of always had an inkling towards some kind of an art form. I grew up in a very small town, and I just figure-skated. My dad played hockey and I was surrounded by sports, but it wasn't quite doing it for me. I wasn't totally fulfilled, and I did a lot of skating.

I've gotten a lot of messages from kids struggling with their identity and sexuality, whether it's because they're in a religious family or a small town or a sport that's not very accepting. I've had a ton of outreach, and I've tried to get back to kids as best I could.

Growing up in a small town gives you two things: a sense of place and a feeling of self-consciousness - self-consciousness about one's education and exposure, both of which tend to be limited. On the other hand, limited possibilities also mean creating your own options.

We have a huge immigration population in Sweden, but when I was younger, I grew up in a small town and, at one point, I was the only foreigner in my class. I really felt different, and I thought I looked different. Sometimes it was a good thing, sometimes I felt insecure.

I grew up in a small town where I went to the movies a lot and fell in love with all these people. I also fell in love with the movie business. So all I saw were actors on the screen so I thought, well, that's what I have to be if I want to be a part of the movie business.

I was the weirdest kid in this small town in Washington. I was the only person who was from somewhere else, so I think they just didn't understand it... They said I was a weirdo or that I didn't belong there. That was the hardest one when people said I didn't belong there.

Art morphs with what's going on in the world. We say 'Ferguson'; we don't say 'Mike Brown.' Just like we say 'Selma,' not 'Jimmie Lee Jackson.' There is something startling about the people in a particular place, a city or a small town, rising up and taking to the streets.

I'm not really that private of a person. I live in a small town and I'm very neighborly. I go out to dinner just about four nights a week and sit and talk to people. I'm not that private, so it's not that strange to do an interview and try to share a little bit of your life.

For the first five years of my life, I grew up in a log cabin in coastal British Columbia in a very small town, like 300 people, mostly hippies. No running water, no electricity. When I was 12, I changed my name from Dharma to Stewart. At that age, you just want to be normal.

I think growing up in such a small town - before cell phones, before the Internet, before Facebook, before we had access to people's interiors - there was a great deal of space between people's lives. I spent a lot of time imagining into the lives of the people I grew up with.

I had a hard time when I came back to Sweden and started school, because I looked different. And we moved to a really small town on the west coast of Sweden, and there were no brown people around. It didn't really get any better until I started music school at about 10 years old.

People always want you to look pretty. I would like to live in the Midwest in a small town and never put makeup on. But they won't let you do that. Once I went through a period when I did do that, wore no makeup, wore my hair any which way, and people looked at me like I was a bum.

I grew up on a farm in a small town where you do or say one thing and everybody knows about it. You see it happen, there's always the town gossip - 'Oh did you hear about so and so, or did you hear what went on in this household?' So I learned at a very young age just to keep my mouth shut.

You must keep people happy backstage because that affects what's onstage. During a run, the playwright feels like the mayor of a small town filled with noble creatures who have to get out there and make it brand new every night. When a production works, it's unlike any other joy in the world.

I grew up in a small town in a low-income family and was the only black kid in my elementary school. I felt like an outsider, and since I didn't know of LGBT people - much less LGBT black women - living happy, healthy, and successful lives, I didn't believe I could ever marry or have a child.

When I was 5 years old, I moved with my mother and brother from Philadelphia to a small town in Florida. People talked more slowly there and said words I had never heard before, like 'ain't' and 'y'all' and 'ma'am.' Everybody knew everybody else. Even if they didn't, they acted like they did.

When I was about 12, I came home from middle school and told my parents I wanted to be an actor. My father didn't say it to me, but he told my mom, 'No. I'm not going to allow that. He'll starve to death.' I grew up in a small town in Illinois where being an actor was not something people did.

When I was 16 I took the first opportunity I had to play basketball in a different country. I flew to Europe for the first time and found myself in the small town of Macon, in France. That was the first time I lived far away from my people, from my culture. I was young and had to adapt quickly.

I'd worked at a small town newspaper, and I was thinking of all the strange stories that I had seen float through the newsroom in my time there that were dismissed as kind of amusing curiosities. Somehow from that I got to this idea of an eccentric alcoholic who built a lighthouse in the woods.

Tina Fey's autobiography is very, very funny and very well written. It's her life story: it's about how she grows up in New York. There's no obvious reason why I should enjoy this - I mean, this is the autobiography of a woman in her early 40s in New York. I'm a guy from a small town in Denmark.

As an individual, and I have to say as a person of color, the thing about being an 'other' in America is I really feel like you're bilingual. I'm from a small town in Wisconsin, but even when I'm in New York and I'm working for MSNBC or CNN, you're used to being the only black person in the room.

I was born in a middle class Muslim family, in a small town called Myonenningh in a northern part of Bangladesh in 1962. My father is a qualified physician; my mother is a housewife. I have two elder brothers and one younger sister. All of them received a liberal education in schools and colleges.

Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others.

From 1985 to 1994, I lived in Manhattan in a big old loft right off Times Square. I could walk to work, which was in a couple of Broadway theaters, to Howard Stern's studio, and to 30 Rock for 'Letterman' and 'SNL.' Even in New York, walking to work is homey and folksy, like living in a small town.

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