I was born on August 10, 1913, in Lorenzkirch, a small village in Saxony, as the fourth child of Theodor and Elisabeth Paul, nee Ruppel. All in all, we were six children. Both parents were descendants from Lutheran ministers in several generations.
I was born and raised in Southall; we had two houses which we made into one big one because there were 12 of us living there: me and my bro, my parents, my grandparents, and my dad's brother's family.
I used to live in a village, and I always loved listening to old people. Unfortunately, it was always women who were talking, because after the war, very few men were around. I spent my entire life living in the village. The village is always talking about itself; people are talking to each other as the village makes sense of itself.
Thing big: Universe is a village, a small place! When you think big, all will get smaller!
A lot of the music is the kind of thing I grew up with, listening to it with my parents. So there was a band in London called the BBC Big Band, and I sang with them. And I had never done a big band before, and it was just so fantastic and I had such a good time...so that's how it all came about
My parents are from the South - they were both born in Birmingham - so my dad saw R.E.M. really early on when they were playing college stuff in Athens. He had a bunch of their cassettes from the '80s, and when I was 8, 9, or 10, those were the sort of things that were around the cassette player in the living room.
You think of your first album, when we had no clue what we were doing, we had no clue if people were going to like it or not, we did it because we love it.
Many people believe that they were made by their parents: 'I didn't ask to be born.' they cry. This is completely wrong. Please try to remember when your were five. If you try then you will remember that this memory had no beginning. It seems as if you can remember living infinitely; that your life didn't begin when you were born but continues without limit.
I grew up in the small German village of Bosingen, which is located between Black Forest and the state capital of Stuttgart. And when I say small, I mean small. In our village, there were no more than 1,700 people. And we all loved football, but there weren't a lot of places for us boys around town to play in.
I come from a small village and have had no formal training in music or any classes from the masters of Indian classical music.
At the beginning of the 20th century, before the migration began, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. By the end of the Great Migration, nearly half of them were living outside the South in the great cities of the North and West. So when this migration began, you had a really small number of people who were living in the North and they were surviving as porters or domestics or preachers - some had risen to levels of professional jobs - but they were, in some ways, protected because they were so small.
The big man in a small village is the big ship in a small lake! Let him sail to the vast oceans!
When I was in Afghanistan in 2007, I went from village to village where refugees had returned, and they were living out in the open under tents, sometimes completely exposed to the environment. And they were homeless, which meant they would lose children in the winter to the cold and in the summers in the extreme heat. It's extremely humiliating for them to be homeless, culturally it's very shameful.
I was born and I live in a small village, where the centre of life is the square, and the small bar/cafe.
My parents were big music fans, and my dad plays music, so I grew up with Madonna, Frank Zappa, the Beatles, Alice In Chains... it was all over the place. I had a Third Eye Blind record, but I also had Korn, Courtney Love, and Shania Twain.
We can't go on forever with 11 million people living in this country in the shadows in an illegal status. We cannot forever have children who were born here - who were brought here by their parents when they were small children to live in the shadows, as well... What's changed, honestly, is that there is a new appreciation on both sides of the aisle, maybe more importantly on the Republican side, that we need to enact a comprehensive immigration reform bill.