Homer Hickam Quotes

I came from a very, very small valley in the middle of South Wales. I grew up there with my father, who's a coal miner, and my mother worked in a normal factory.

'Dirt Road Diaries,' in my mind, is a perfect country guy song. It speaks to the hard-working guy, and I'm excited for the fans to hear that one.

I really, really look up to Carrie Underwood a lot because she came from a small town that has the same population as mine - 3,500 people.

Oasis were massive for me, because of the attitude and what they represented and how outspoken they were. It felt like they were exactly like me.

Sometimes you make a connection with a writer or a piece of material, and there's not much to ask.

I was born and grew up in Vandalia, Illinois, a small town of about 6,000. It was farm country, and this was the little county seat.

I am a small-town girl.

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

I can't escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.

I think, because I'm an artist, part of my job is to be a barometer, an antenna. It's in the air and it resonates with a lot of people to lighten up.

On my mother's side, I come from Midlands engineers and, on my father's, from tenant farmers near Oxford.

My musical heroes are people like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie who wrote and sang real songs for real people; for everyone, old, young, and in between.

I grew up all over Idaho - I was born in Emmett, a very small town.

People of a certain age look back on the Mayberry of 'The Andy Griffith Show' and become almost as homesick for that simple fictional hamlet as they do for their own home towns.

I grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts. My background was modest, and I worked at a Portuguese bakery in town.

No matter how brilliantly an idea is stated, we will not really be moved unless we have already half thought of it ourselves.

My inspiration is always what I think my fans want to listen to. I often write about social problems. If I'm not going through it or I haven't gone through it, I want to make sure it touches someone. That's what I base my music on.

The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn't know that we were any different from anybody else.

When you feel moved by the story, you want to tell that story.

I fell in love with Norman Mailer's 'Of a Fire on the Moon', a description of the 1969 moon landing and the society that had produced NASA - and was inspired by him to begin a kind of anthropology of modern life.

Country music's so about the nuclear family and living the southern lifestyle and everything.

I grew up in a refinery town in Texas, and we weren't fancy enough to have a McDonald's.

I come from a very, very small town. There were no other actors around. I never met any actors. A lot of those times when I'd be out in the sheds with my dad, I'd step outside, and there's just nothing out there but thousands of acres, forty thousand sheep, and miles of nothing. And so my mind would just wonder about what else was out there.

I loved the Woody Guthrie tradition of speaking about what's happening to the country.