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.
There are aspects of small town life that I really like - the routine nature of it, the idea of people knowing you and your likes and dislikes.
I was 19 when I wrote 'Dreams,' and that would have been when it started to happen. The band got signed, and I was probably beginning to see different things besides my small town of Ballybricken.
I got hit by the bug of reading - not via a person, but via the one-room library in our small town. I remember that the children's books were in the right-hand corner near the floor. Often when I went there, I was the only visitor.
I grew up in a very small town, but it happened to be in western Massachusetts, where there were a lot of gay people. I remember my aunt going to a gay wedding when I was 11, and I thought it was the coolest thing.
I was raised in a small town in Indiana and educated at Ball State University.
Every small town has its dramatic group, its barber-shop quartet, every home has music in one form or another.
Right when I started touring, there was this wariness I had of the world outside of my small town. But I'm not that person anymore, and I was never completely that person.
I wasn't always this confident. Growing up as the awkward gay kid in a small town in Pennsylvania, you're constantly told, 'Don't be yourself, don't be proud of who you are.'
I didn't want to spend the next thirty years writing about bad things happening in the same small town - not least of all because people would begin to wonder why anyone still lives there!
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.
Though Lexington is not a small town, it sometimes feels like one, with circles of acquaintance overlapping once, then again; the person you meet by chance at the library or the pool may turn out to be the best friend of your down-the-street neighbor. Maybe that's why people are so friendly here, so willing to be unhurried.
I do all I can to maintain good health. I eat mostly plants, as Michael Pollan would say. I get a lot of exercise. I lead a purposeful daily life. I stay current with the dentist. I made the formative decision of where to live over thirty years ago when I settled in a 'main street' small town in upstate New York.
I think my songs are singing to the rural heart. It's not whether you're from a big city or the middle of nowhere in a small town.
When you live in a small town like Iowa Falls, there's not a lot to do, so we would, as a family, watch a ton of films.
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.
When you are raised, as John Edwards was, in a small town like Robbins, North Carolina, you get to understand poverty and unemployment, or inadequate health care, first-hand by seeing the daily struggles of your friends and neighbors.
That's the trouble with the suburbs: it's not a city, so you're not anonymous, and it's not a small town, so that people really care about you, but everybody kind of knows each other's business, so you're very judged.
It's easier for me to write certain character types because of my own life experiences, but I find it too artistically limiting to only write about red-headed kids who grew up in small town Montana. That's really part of the fun of fantasy, I think. Our imagination is basically unlimited. Okay, that's a terrifying thing about fantasy, too.
I was born in the small town of Gorizia, Italy, on 31 March, 1934. My father was an electrical engineer at the local telephone company and my mother an elementary school teacher.
I grew up in the small town of Haywards Heath, south of London.
I developed 'Trapped' because I was fascinated with the idea of a terrible crime in a small town cut off from the rest of the world.
I'm from a small town, a farm, a hundred acres.
Why not take a science fiction comic and put the characters in a small town to gain their particular perspective? A lot of that comes from me growing up in a small town on a farm, so that's what I know and what I'm comfortable with. My drawing style is also very sparse and minimalist, so a rural setting complements that.
Some of my songs are about the feeling you belong somewhere else. But there's also something grounding about coming from a small town.
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.
I just owe almost everything to my father and it's passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.
Once a bustling logging town, Sandpoint has embraced its natural beauty to become an amazing resort town drawing people near and far to enjoy its beauty and recreational possibilities. It's truly a small town with a huge backyard.
People never expected a boy from a small town to have a life like I did.
For me, and this may not be everybody, but because I do love country music so much, there's such a feeling of home in Nashville, especially because it's such a small town. You bring up one song, everybody knows who wrote it, everybody knows their mother and what their cell number is, and all of the stories.
Portland has all the accoutrements of a big city, but the heart and soul of it is a small town, so that creates an intimacy in a large environment.
My mom Marina and I were poor and hungry. We could sometimes not afford to eat - seriously. We lived together in a small town, called Berdyansk, in Ukraine. I was an only child. I don't think we would have survived if there had been more kids.
I grew up in a small town in Washington State, so I wasn't really aware of costume design as a career growing up, but I loved clothes. I remember I saved all my money, and the first thing that I bought was a white blazer, which was to the horror to my parents. But I have always had a strange connection with clothing.
It sounds like a cliche, but it... you do sing about what you know about. And I grew up in a small town, and I grew up in a place where your whole world revolved around friends, family, school, and church, and sports.
I was just glad to meet somebody outside of my group of small town friends who was into music. Somebody else who had aspirations to do something more than sing at a record hop.
