When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.
A good hanging now and then -- that entertains folk in the provinces and robs death of its glamour.
In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.
The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
After a while the press of business in the province put an end to our philosophizing, and I returned with increased determination to my plans to fly to the Moon.
I first read 'Madame Bovary' in my teens or early twenties.
If you lived in a provincial town like Torre Annunziata, where there was nothing to do in the evening but go to the movies with your friends, the cinema was a world of fantasy. I had always been in love with it.
I come from the bottom of the ladder. I'm from Norwich. Not many people seem to know about it.
I was kind of sheltered. I grew up in Silsbee, Texas, a town of 3,000 people.
As a child, I wanted only two things - to be left alone to read my library books, and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there, I wanted to make loads of money.
There are two completely different Britains. There's London, and there's the rest of Britain. Attitudes are very different.
When I was a child, I saw in the news that a person from Belitung had done well in sports in Jakarta, and I just couldn't imagine that it was possible for someone from here to become famous, and it's still very isolated out here.
It was a small provincial place with great people and I had a happy childhood growing up in Queens.
London has been used as the emblematic English city, but it's far from representative of what life in England is actually about.
The monotony of provincial life attracts the attention of people to the kitchen. You do not dine as luxuriously in the provinces as in Paris, but you dine better, because the dishes serve you are the result of mediation and study.
I spent a lot of time in a small town in France, growing up.
But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.
I am haunted by what my life would have been had I not had the courage in my early twenties to leave Pittsburgh for New York City and really commit to being a writer. Pittsburgh is both post-industrial and provincial, and the opportunities there are limited. It would have been quite easy to simply drift through life.
Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.
Life in the world... was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder. The dominant sign in that paradise of provincial frivolity was fear of the unknown.
I grew up in a town - it was so small that I was like, 'There's absolutely no way that I'm going to stay here and live the kind of life that everybody else does.'
Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom-ah the soul-destroying boredom-of long days of mild content.
I sometimes think the only true record of England is the 'Cumberland News.'
I listen to money singing, it's like looking down from long French windows at a provincial town. The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.
