Tom Drury Quotes

I write about my region, the countryside in which I grew up.

The only traffic I had to deal with in Alabama was a tractor.

I grew up like a lot of country boys and girls do - amongst the pine trees, dirt roads, farms, mules and people who were real.

I like rural areas.

I'm a Midwesterner by birth, and when I traveled there, when I was young, most of the small towns were thriving, vibrant places.

I write about people in small towns; I don't write about people living in big cities. My kind of storytelling depends upon people that have time to talk to each other.

A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.

I'm not a city kind of guy. I'm happiest when I'm tromping through the woods. That's why I don't live in Los Angeles. Being physically away from Hollywood probably loses me a few jobs, but the best ones seek me out.

With the advent of spring and beginning of the new harvest season the creators of abundance, our peasants, come out to the fields to sow with good aspirations and hopes.

I was a typical farm boy. I liked the farm. I enjoyed the things that you do on a farm, go down to the drainage ditch and fish, and look at the crawfish and pick a little cotton.

In Tennessee where I grew up, there were animals, farms, wagons, mules.

A hospital is a good place to set various dilemmas.

I don't believe in trouble. Because I think that trouble is sometimes good, sometimes bad. I've been known to be called trouble, which I think is quite a compliment. But I suppose, thinking about it, that my best and worst trouble has always had something to do with a man.

I don't know a single person in life that doesn't have conflict.

I really try to say things as they basically are and it so happens that it is a good message that things are getting better, but there are still problems.

I was born in 1940 in Minnesota and grew up in the country... dirt roads, swamps, lakes, woods.

I'm from a very, very rural place. There's really nobody out there, just roads and farms.

I love the smell of skunks. Driving down a back road and you smell a skunk that's sprayed or been hit. I love that. It reminds me of home.

I'm certainly not squeamish at all. The countryside makes you very aware of birth and death.

I don't do a lot when I'm in Gascony. I swim and play the odd game of golf, but mainly I sit around. We're set an hour-and-a-half from the Pyrenees and an hour-and-a-half from the Bay of Biscay, so we get plenty of storms. But we're surrounded by vines and sunflowers - it's lovely.

Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those of the neighborhood of the town. They are upon that the greatest of all improvements.

People are wanted on the farms to raise corn and grow stock for the markets; but they are wanted there far more for the training of manhood and womanhood in moral worth, in religious sensibility, in all the traits of a strong, upright personality. In the future as never heretofore, our cities with their multiplying wealth and lavish luxury are likely to need the country for that steady renewal of their better life which shall keep them from relaxing into sensuality and sinking into decay.

Farm life requires teamwork to a greater degree than any other way of life.

The manufacturing population still lived to a very great extent in the country. The artisan often had his small piece of land, which supplied him with wholesome food and healthy recreation. His wages and employment too were more regular. He was not subject to the uncertainties and knew nothing of the fearful sufferings which his descendants were to endure from commercial fluctuations

I've been in my share of trouble.