As soon as I was old enough to drive, I got a job at a local newspaper. There was someone who influenced me. He wrote a column for The Guardian from this tiny village in India.
One of the first things that helped me to understand certain things about writing was seeing 'The Iceman Cometh' in the Village when I was a kid, before I ever became a newspaperman, and realizing that the world I knew could also be the subject of some amazing stuff.
I was raised in a sort of village. I have a huge family, and I think there is strength in that. It helped me to deal with some of the complications of living in the South because I always felt like I belonged, no matter what.
What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'
My only worry about tweeting and modern technology is how it has crept into even the darkest corners of the absolute global village we live in.
This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone.
Not long ago, in an excruciatingly remote village in the Australian Outback, I was startled to see a bartender in a cowboy hat measuring out a classically proportioned French 75 - something he'd picked up on the Internet, he told me.
The village had a mill near it, situated on the little creek, which made very good flour. The population consisted of civilized Indians, but much mixed blood.
Village cricket spread fast through the land.
The sneaker comes from sports, but it's couture now. It's not made in Asia: it's made in my little village in Italy. I can customize everything. I use silk and diamonds and crystals. I think my sneakers have a lot of good vibrations.
Very much like that, and very much a loner, do you know and I didn't fit really into sport or all kind of group activities as a kid, I couldn't find a niche. And music was not really part of the kind of village curriculum it would, you know.
Let every man, every corporation, and especially let every village, town, and city, every county and State, get out of debt and keep out of debt. It is the debtor that is ruined by hard times.
It is indeed fitting for me to make a comment to the effect that it takes a village to raise a child because I have lived in many villages down in deep south, and everyone there who played a part in my stewardship as a young man growing up and as a professional, they have given me unstinting support.
I grew up in a small, strictly-Catholic fishing village on the coast of Wales. The people there have a different attitude to life than those in Hollywood - people stick together more.
Every day or two, I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.
Even a small village in the middle of Africa with a 3D printer will have access to any good it can download. The world of the 'Star Trek' replicator is not far away.
As a young boy growing up in rural India, most of what I knew of the world was what I could see around me. But each night, I would look at the Moon - it was impossibly far away, yet it held a special attraction because it allowed me to dream beyond my village and country, and think about the rest of the world and space.
South Africa has all the tools to compete in the new global village - an eager workforce, ready to take on any challenge.
My grandfather and his wife came to America at the end of the 19th century from Hungary. Everyone started out on the Lower East Side. They became embourgeoise and would move to the Upper West Side. Then, if they'd make money, they'd move to Park Avenue. Their kids would become artists and move down to the Lower East Side and the Village.
I love the East Village.
