In college, my wife did a study abroad in Nairobi, and I did the exact same program in Cape Town. For me, the experience of being in that other culture really set up a longing. When I’m traveling, things seem really sharp. You learn things ten times faster.
We grew up as kids watching those movies and we were exposed to themes of civil rights, unfairness, bigotry and fathers struggling against the kind of mob of the town, so you remember how you felt as a kid being taken seriously, that you are part of the human drama.
I always want to find the best burger in town.
My mother was the prettiest woman in the town. He was a bit older than her. They made me. And he split.
In the ‘Revelation Space’ books, the spaceships are a bit old and rusty, and things go wrong, and they don’t work quite how they’re meant to. And people asked why I did it this way, and groping around for an explanation, I said that I grew up in Barry, this post-industrial sea town full of rusting infrastructure.
If I’m in a town for very long, usually I’ll work out in the comedy club just to keep my chops or work out the beats on new stuff.
Even in my hometown of Linkoping where I grew up… the church we had was very lavish – very boasty. So it ticked most of the boxes of big, imposing Christianity. And I love being there if I’m in town… because it’s just this haunting place.
Sometimes, I wonder where my place in this town called ‘Hollywood’ is – and that can give you a really dull headache.
Silicon Valley isn’t the only game in town. Tech is increasingly decentralized. Around the world, new tech centers with younger companies are able to embrace a different approach to talent: recruit locally, identify homegrown prospects and, in a phrase, bring them along for the ride.
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.
Know how to travel from your town to a nearby town without a car, either by bus or by rail.
I grew up in a conservative small town, and the gay characters I saw on TV and in movies when I was growing up were all flamboyant and obnoxious and sometimes kind of annoying.
Partly because the town is just finicky, there are strange Catch 22 clauses in the consciousness of this community and one of them was that you, I found out, you can’t do a comedy unless you’ve just done a comedy.
I think I knew acting was what I wanted to do. But I was from this small town and there was no place for an adult to recognise it.
I was at the first Minor Threat show, and you could tell, ‘This band is going to be the king of the town.’ It was obvious. They were so good.
It’s so funny, because when I was growing up in a small town in New Hampshire, I was obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio – from the ‘Growing Pains’/’What’s Eating Gilbert Grape’ era, because he was superhot – and I carried a laminated photo of him in my wallet and said he was my boyfriend. But no one believed me.
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.
Special interests and opponents have figured out how easy it is to disrupt town halls and get their own message out. The days of the truly free-form town halls may be over.
The Animals were a very separate and dissonant group at the time. We came from different backgrounds, different areas – we didn’t even come from the same town, basically.
My introduction to the Madonna Inn came as a young boy when we would take summer vacations to a nearby town. My dad would take us into their gift shop bathroom, which was a huge waterfall that functioned as the men’s urinal. So as a kid, this was the most amazing thing I had ever seen.
Country town to the city heart, in every corner of the globe you’ll find a Chinatown, a Chinese restaurant or an Asian grocer. From this vast and ancient culture, we credit noodles, dumplings, rice, countless spices and cooking techniques to have enriched every culture that they’ve landed in.
I grew up in a very celebratory town. We celebrate everything, from life to death and everything in between. So a lot of dramatics come into my aesthetic. And I’m an actor, so that adds more to the dramatic – I don’t mean over-the-top. The main thing is never to be boring.
I grew up in a very small, rural country town, and we didn’t really have ‘the arts.’
If the Frieze Art Fair catches on, I imagine at least two great things happening. First, we will once again have a huge art fair in town that isn’t too annoying to go to. More importantly, Frieze may finally show New Yorkers that we can cross our own waters for visual culture. That would change everything.
I want my songs to be enjoyed by those who travel in a town bus and they should be played repeatedly in a tea shop.
You can’t live in New York City and be the most important person in town; you just can’t. There are too many other important people here.
I left school when I was 16; then I worked for my father, who was a welder. And I was a welder for three years, you know, welder of fabrication, metal ’cause it was a big industrial town, Sheffield. It was much steel and coal and stuff like that.
I think mobility is very important, not only to discover opportunities elsewhere but at times, also to appreciate better what your home town has. Allahabad, for instance, has the feel of a small, tightly-knit community where everyone participates.
Buckhannon, population 5,639, is a deeply conservative town and long has been. While coal is its past, oil and gas are its likely future. It’s a town where guns are sold at yard sales, where Pentecostal churches are nearly as common as restaurants, and where distrust of Hillary Clinton is visceral and deep-seated.
My youngest son, who is now the drummer in my band, lives in Brooklyn. My oldest son is about to move out to California, and my daughters are both out of town.
They were fun days, and we set the town on fire with every movie we did.
I grew up in Michigan, in a very small town, Centreville. In my graduating class, I had like 92 people.
You can’t very well live in a castle while your kin is on the poor side of town and barely have enough food. Some want you to get to the top and rely on you making it for them, too.
It started 25 years ago, when I was teaching elementary school in a small town in Missouri.
Put yourself in the position of an up-and-coming artist living in early-sixteenth-century Italy. Now imagine trying to distinguish yourself from the other artists living in your town: Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, or Titian. Is it any wonder that the Italian High Renaissance lasted only 30 years?
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, is right there… she’s in town because her father was at Johnson Smith College… and she was delivering a speech there.
It’s maybe hard to believe, but as a kid I really had a lot of self-doubts. My father was very ill – he was an alcoholic – so there were a lot of things that built up for me. And because I was going to a Catholic school in a small German town, a lot of it was suppressed. I was angry and didn’t know how to get it out.
I grew up in a very racially integrated place called Pottstown. It was an agricultural / industrial town which has since become a suburb of Philadelphia. I grew up basically in a black neighborhood.
I grew up in a small farming town called Concord, outside Charlotte in North Carolina.
Miami was always a town that was kind to me as a wrestler. It’s a great wrestling town, and it’s a great town, period. There’s so much to do in Miami.
How can you wonder what’s going to happen when you don’t know who’s going to be the new guy in town?
I feel lucky that I got to work with some of the big legends in town.
Because we’re in a small town and somewhat isolated from the fast lane of high tech, we’ve been able to grow and concentrate on our work instead of being distracted by the competition and getting caught up in the soap opera of Silicon Valley.
In the rural South, you have a town of 30,000 people and everybody’s pretty much thrown on the same pile of doo-doo. You just learn to make the best of it and live with one another.
I wanted to go to Portland because it’s a really good book town.
Before I left Russia in 1999, I was living in a very poor factory town with my family and friends, and nothing was ever going to change.
After Lock, Stock, all these really nasty small town characters came knocking at my door trying to tell me stories, and somehow I ended up with this guy whose brother was feeding people to pigs, and that’s what he did to get rid of people.
The older I grow the more I see the influence of my family on my life. I didn’t always see it. It was up to our parents to see that we had our education in a town that hadn’t yet realized what racial prejudice was but actually knew and practiced it on occasion.
I’ve been visiting Thailand for more than 20 years but didn’t fall in love with it until I visited Phuket Town in Phuket. The northern part of Phuket is one of the most fascinating places I’ve ever been, and largely unspoilt and unknown.
