I've known the poet Eileen Myles since the 1990s, when I first moved to New York, and I remember seeing her walking her Pit Bull Rosie around the East Village. She had these beautiful arms and David Cassidy hair and the sort of swagger so many of the gay boys I knew wished we had. We all had crushes on her.

Soon after joining the Ministry of Health in Ethiopia, I was called upon as part of team to respond to a malaria outbreak. My team was dispatched to a village in southwestern Ethiopia, where I not only observed the malaria epidemic's shocking effects on adults and children but also experienced it first-hand.

I have a constituency with 52,000 people and a million sheep. I was in one village where a local kid was run over by a tractor. They took him to Carlisle, but they couldn't be bothered to wait at the hospital. So they put him in a darkened room for two weeks, then said he was fine. But I'm not so sure he was.

I was going to become a youth worker because I do voluntary work with the kids in the little village where I live. I make little films with them and stuff when I'm not working. I thought, I'll pack it in then, and go and do something I love doing, and get a regular job because I've got two kids and a mortgage.

I went to all the shops in the village looking for work. I didn't have any qualifications. I ended up working in a grocery shop for about a year and then went to a confectioner, where I earned three pounds 10 shillings. I gave the money to my mother and father, but I also managed to save five shillings a week.

The Star City community - because it's not a big city, actually; it's only 14 big houses, and everybody knows each other. It's like a small village, and I felt that somehow everybody wants to help me, especially during days when my father flew, and somehow care about me, and it was really great time, you know.

It takes a village to earn a spot representing your country, and I know that every single person who helped me get to the Olympics was also touched by the dream. The web of inspiration is incredible. Because of this, I know that the core principles and spirit of what the Olympics stand for are worth protecting.

I want to pass on my secrets to people who are going to say, 'I have realised that I love baking, and now I'm going to make my bread and sell it at the local farmers' market,' or who might say, 'I am going to use the local Post Office in our village to sell my cakes.' I want to give them that little bit of fire.

Every day, women and girls are finding incredible confidence and taking risks. When they change one mind, pretty soon, they have changed one tradition. That changed tradition has changed a village. That one village has changed a country. That new reality means new opportunities for themselves and their daughters.

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

My own life values were shaped in great part by my mother, who instigated women's clubs in my village. Women were able to organize and stand together. What inspired me most about their work was the power it gave them to assert their rights and the rights of their daughters, be it education or property inheritance.

The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

You get some directors, and I can never understand it - there's a thing they call the 'video village' where all the monitors are, and you've probably seen it on set visits - I hate that! I never, ever like sitting in video village. I get either my own monitor or a hand held monitor, and I stand right by the camera.

As a child growing up in a grey-skied Yorkshire village, I would occasionally happen upon a Bollywood movie on the television. After a few minutes watching a bunch of sari-clad dancers cavorting on a Swiss mountain to tuneless music, I would switch over to some proper drama about housing estates and single mothers.

Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?

A lot of skaters hole themselves up in hotels and focus - and that's great, and that may work for them. But for me, having the Olympic experience was as great as winning the medal. I have so many memories of living in the village and meeting other athletes, seeing other sports, and feeling the energy. It's so magical.

As a young boy growing up in rural India, most of what I knew of the world was what I could see around me. But each night, I would look at the Moon - it was impossibly far away, yet it held a special attraction because it allowed me to dream beyond my village and country, and think about the rest of the world and space.

I do go back to Russia frequently, about twice a year. I hate the flight, but it's worth it. My parents have a home in a little village of 12 houses. It's not on any map, so unless you know it's there, you won't find it. Nothing works there; no Internet, no cell phone, and the land line only works sometimes. It's great!

Monica Besra, a Bengali woman from a remote Indian village, was reportedly suffering from a malignant ovarian tumor when she went, in 1998, to a hospice founded by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. Nuns at the mission reportedly placed a medallion with Teresa's image on Besra's abdomen, and the tumor disappeared.

I would often take this bus and go to a nearby village where I had hordes of animal friends. I was hardly around four or five years old then. The conductor was so used to seeing me hop on to the bus and get down at the same place, that he never asked any questions. The strangest part is, he never asked for a ticket either!

India allows you the luxury of a million inequalities. You can be a schoolboy selling tea to passengers sitting in a state transport bus, but you are royalty when compared to a shirtless, barefoot village boy, from what was traditionally considered an untouchable caste, living on snails and small fish - and sometimes rats.

Two days after the Boston marathon bombings, there was a drone strike in Yemen attacking a peaceful village, which killed a target who could very easily have been apprehended. But, of course, it is just easier to terrorise people. The drones are a terrorist weapon; they not only kill targets but also terrorise other people.

You could say I was born into entrepreneurship. My grandmother, who was from Sierra Leone, was left to raise four children in the 1940s in a rural village in West Africa after becoming a young widow. To support her family, she made natural skin and hair care preparations and sold them primarily to missionaries and villagers.

The truth is I am not a very hands-on political wife; I don't get involved in day-to-day Downing Street life. They don't need me interfering, but in the evening, we will talk about each other's day. I try to stay out of the Westminster village. There are times when I will be surprised and curious about what's been announced.

The Haisla named this point Obela. Not so long ago, the bay was lined with longhouses and canoes, totem poles and fishing gear. The reserve was once a winter village, a place to celebrate the sacred season, when memories passed in dance and song and stories from one generation to the next with great feasts called potlatches.

One day, I'll disappear and hide in a corner of Britain. I'll own a bakery in a village, live above it, have a big garden because I like mowing. I want to get up when I feel like it, let people queue for my products, and when they're gone, shut the shop and think about tomorrow. Creating magic - that's my dream. And I'll do it.

Something I learned when I was very young: with cooking, it doesn't matter where you are; you can always cook. You can end up in small village in Peru where somebody's cooking, take a spoon and taste it, and you might not be too sure what you're eating, but you can taste the soul in the food. That's what is beautiful with food.

I, and others like me - trap stars - we always considered ourselves Robin Hoods: we go out and get the money. Just think, if you was in the village and you a hunter, you take pride in going out to hunt the prey and bring it back for the village to eat. In our situation, we took pride in getting money so that the hood could eat.

These are such First World problems, but there's a certain claustrophobia to New York. You don't escape in the East Village, but it at least feels full of camaraderie and youth - or full of camaraderie and youth in an East Village that is as full of Chase banks and Starbucks as the Upper West Side, or anywhere else in Manhattan.

The organization I founded in 1993, Camfed (the Campaign for Female Education), was in large part inspired by the generosity shown to me by a community in a village in Zimbabwe. During my visit to Mola to research girls' exclusion from education, the people of Mola fed me, shaded me, walked and talked with me for hours each day.

Samasource creates jobs in regions where more traditional forms of employment in low-income economies, such as manufacturing, are difficult to scale because of poor infrastructure. In a village in Rukka, India, for example, our small data entry partner employs over 60 people doing various types of Internet research for Samasource.

Who is a professional? A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief. A water diviner is a professional. A traditional midwife is a professional. A traditional bone setter is a professional. These are professionals all over the world. You find them in any inaccessible village around the world.

The prevailing view was that girls were outside of school because of the resistance of families to their education. But when I visited a local village, what everyone told me - the chiefs, the parents, the children - was that girls weren't in school because it was the boys that had a better chance of getting paid work in the future.

I used to live in a village, and I always loved listening to old people. Unfortunately, it was always women who were talking, because after the war, very few men were around. I spent my entire life living in the village. The village is always talking about itself; people are talking to each other as the village makes sense of itself.

You frequently ask, where are the friends of your childhood, and urge that they shall be brought back to you. As far as I am able to learn, those of your friends who are not in jail are still right there in your native village. You point out that they were wont to share your gambols, If so, you are certainly entitled to have theirs now.

I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.

I was born in a little town called Lund in British Columbia. It's like a fishing village. My parents were hippies. They tried to live off the land, so I grew up in a log cabin, and we didn't get running water until I was 4. The next year, we got electricity. Then we moved to the city, Victoria, British Columbia, so I could go to school.

My grandfather and his wife came to America at the end of the 19th century from Hungary. Everyone started out on the Lower East Side. They became embourgeoise and would move to the Upper West Side. Then, if they'd make money, they'd move to Park Avenue. Their kids would become artists and move down to the Lower East Side and the Village.

I lived in a small village outside the city and grew up in a large family, so my world was very much centred around that. I used to sing in the local church, and I would also occasionally sing in the local pubs for which I used to get a few bob. That, for me, was the start of my interest in music, which has obviously expanded since then.

My favorite records are, like, The Pretty Things' 'Parachute' and 'S.F. Sorrow' and The Mothers of Invention's 'We're Only in It for the Money' and The Kinks' 'Village Green Preservation Society' - these records that have a story - even if it's not a literal story - because of how they're sequenced and flow. It's like a novel with sound.

To Mahatma Gandhi, the key to India's progress was the development of its villages. In his unified vision, education, agriculture, village industry, social reform all came together to provide the basis for a vibrant rural society free from exploitation and linked to the urban centres as equals. Our planning incorporates this basic insight.

My older brother was a musical prodigy, and he got a scholarship to the Bronx House Music School. We moved to the Bronx when I was 4 to be close to his music school. Then I got a music scholarship myself, at the age of 6, but that was for a school down in Greenwich Village. I had to take the elevated train and then the subway to get there.

I live in New York City, and one day many years ago I was with a poet, Gregory Corso, walking through Greenwich Village. He pointed to a doorway in an alley that he said led to a tunnel under Manhattan, a tunnel he'd use to run from the cops. I started learning about old Prohibition-era speakeasy tunnels under the city, for running whiskey.

Part of what attracted me to the village was it had a lot of parallels to contemporary issues. Like, fear and the way fear controls us. How the governing body of a town, or a nation, controls us through fear. They might mean well by it, but we are conditioned to be afraid of things. Fear of the unknown. Fear of terrorism. And it's unfortunate.

In the books I have written, I have created in my mind a universe. My kids say I have a village in my head and I live in that village, and it's true. When I start writing a book, characters from previous books reappear. All my emotions, my mind, my heart, my dreams, everything becomes connected with a new book, and nothing else really matters.

'Ice Cold' is the eighth in my 'Rizzoli and Isles' thriller series. It was inspired by a true occurrence in the 1960s, now known as the 'Dugway Incident,' in which 6,000 sheep mysteriously died overnight in a remote area of Utah. I thought, 'What if it happened instead to people? What if the inhabitants of an entire village vanished overnight?'

The idea came from my wife, since in our village, women cannot afford to buy sanitary pads. When I asked my wife, she told me we would have to cut down half of our milk budget to buy sanitary pads. Moreover, while raw materials for sanitary pads cost 10 paise, the end product was sold for 40 times that price. So, I decided to create it on my own.

When I was nine, the teacher asked us to write a piece about our village fete. He read mine in class. I was encouraged and continued. I even wanted to write my memoirs at the age of ten. At twelve I wrote poetry, mostly about friendship - 'Ode to Friendship.' Then my class wanted to make a film, and one little boy suggested that I write the script.

Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.

They [Rappites] were moving from Southern Indiana to Pennsylvania, where they had originally settled when they came from Germany. They were looking for someone who wanted to buy a pre-built town, which wouldn't have been appropriate for any kind of normal settlement. That's when Robert Owen [Welsh industrialist and utopian socialist] buys the village and founds New Harmony.

Share This Page