Mo Yan Quotes

I'm all about small towns. I think it's a great place to grow up.

As a child, the paddy field was my playground.

I grew up in Georgia, in a small town in the southwest corner of Georgia, actually, called Sylvester.

I've come to realize how much it really was a part of my upbringing, the Georgia part. We were away from town. It was just dirt and trees and spouses. And a lot of kids - my cousins, who were all like brothers and sisters to me - just a lot of kids at one time.

I go back to a very specific aspect of the Midwest - small towns surrounded by farmland. They make a good stage for what I like to write about, i.e., roads and houses, bridges and rivers and weather and woods, and people to whom strange or interesting things happen, causing problems they must overcome.

I grew up in Carville, Louisiana.

I suppose more than anything, it's the way of life in this part of the country that influences my writing. In Eastern North Carolina, with the exception of Wilmington, most people live in small towns.

I was born in Fayette County, over in Lexington, Kentucky, but I was raised most of my life in Paintsville.

I was born in Paris and raised in the suburbs and then lived in the countryside.

My father worked in agriculture, and I got to travel round remote rural areas with him and see a bit of the landscape and people.

I grew up on a farm.

I lived in Meadowbrook. I went to church at Meadowbrook United Methodist Church. I went to school at Meadowbrook Elementary School and then Meadowbrook Middle School. I learned to dance at Meadowbrook Country Club. All those things grounded me in one place and I think most of Fort Worth is just like the area I grew up in.

The memories that I have are mostly at our old ranch, out in Agoura. We used to go out there every Saturday. I can smell the oak trees. I can see it so clearly.

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 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.

Perugia is my true fatherland because there I grew to manhood.

I'm one of five kids and we lived on a massive farm in New South Wales with my mum and dad.

Growing up on a mountain in Tennessee, I spent most of my childhood outside.

People wonder why I love Africa so much. I say this is where I was born and raised. My roots are in Africa; that's were I developed.

Over the years, I've lived in a variety of places, including America, but I was born and raised in the Lake District, in Cumbria. Growing up in that rural, sodden, mountainous county has shaped my brain, perhaps even my temperament.

I would love to write the story of my upbringing in Ireland.

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 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.

I am a country boy at heart.

I was born in the poor countryside. I was raised in the countryside, planting corn and selling sweets made by my grandmother.