Bill Callahan Quotes

There are these little towns outside of L.A. Once you get an hour and a half, two hours out, you get into these little, tiny towns that are almost like stuck in time.

News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.

I would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.

It's typical for people living in nonurban areas to drive 100 miles to go to work, to the grocery store or to the doctor.

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

The country makes me more paranoid, you know? I think the crazy people out there are little crazier.

I meet a lot of young people in the Midwest, and I saw what a difference a show like In the Life can make to their lives in some of these small towns where, you know, there are probably two gay people in the whole damn town.

Many small towns I know in Maine are as tight-knit and interdependent as those I associate with rural communities in India or China; with deep roots and old loyalties, skeptical of authority, they are proud and inflexibly territorial.

Small towns are the worst for getting recognised.

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.

New Zealand is not a small country but a large village.

I hate small towns because once you've seen the cannon in the park there's nothing else to do.

The trouble with those people is that they think all the best things are made in the cities. It is not so.

I think true wilderness can still be found, but it's hard to reach and dangerous when you get there, which is probably why it still exists.

I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.

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.

A place that doesn't welcome tourists, that's really difficult and off the map, is a place I want to see.

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 met people when we lived down in Raleigh who'd ask where I grew up, and I'd say about two hours west of Asheville, and they'd say they didn't know there was any North Carolina two hours west of Asheville. It was in many ways an isolated place.

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.

There are places that I've always wanted to go. First I went to Africa, and when I was there I realized there were places in Africa I really to wanted to visit: The Congo, West Africa, Mombassa. I wanted to see the deep, dark, outlandish places.

I enjoy going on motorcycle trips and stopping in small towns and enjoying drinks with the locals.

The beauty of my journey is that it's always been pretty unpredictable, so stay tuned.

I've always lived in small places.