Iowa Quotes

Speaking of River City in The Music Man & his home town, Mason City, Iowa: I didn't have to make up anything. I simply remembered Mason City as closely as I could.

For graduate school I ended up going to the University of Iowa, which is, of course, the best graduate writing program in the country.

Iowa's the worst. Iowa's just nothing, just flat as far as you can see. It's the only state in the country where you can stand on your front porch and actually watch your dog run away for three days.

Here in Iowa, as a state senator, I have worked hard to find solutions that work for our state and as a result we've reduced taxes and lowered the unemployment rate. We have done that through hard work and sticking to our Iowa values. In the final months of this campaign I'll be asking voters to send me, and those Iowa values, to Washington, D.C.

One of the first things I bought when I made 'Roseanne Show' money was a farm in Iowa.

I haven't seen Iowa people get so excited since the night Frank Gotch and Strangler Lewis lay on the mat for three and a half hours without moving a muscle.

The United States does not have a very good record in the Middle East. I think they have the best of intentions but I think the problem is that it's very difficult from Washington, or from Iowa or Nebraska to understand what is happening in this crazy part of the world. In some cases US diplomacy has been somewhat naive.

I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa. It was because I spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and BFW Hall, and there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points. There's some counties maybe I won, that people didn't expect, because people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for and who you were fighting for.

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.

People always - I think were surprised about me connecting with folks in small town Iowa. And the reason I did was - first of all, I had the benefit that at the time nobody expected me to win. And so I wasn't viewed through this prism of Fox News and conservative media making me scary. At the time, I didn't think seem scary, other than just having a funny name. I seemed young.

I think the paparazzi is a necessary evil...and if ya don't like it, and ya don't want to do this, go to Iowa and do some community theatre. It's all about self-promotion and it's not always the fun part of it.

The greatest words you hear in college basketball are Ohio State advances. (The Iowa upset) is amazing. But again, it's all the proof you need that there's no guarantee.

If you can stitch together that kind of coalition with young people, bringing together conservatives and evangelicals - and I will tell you, in Iowa, we also won Reagan Democrats, working-class voters.

I've been looking at some video clips on YouTube of President Obama, then candidate Obama, going through Iowa making promises. I think the gap between his promises and his performance is the largest I've seen, well, since the Kardashian wedding and the promise of 'til death do we part.

Hillary Clinton is driving across Iowa in a van. It's to get to know the people she'll never, ever see again in her life.

Hillary Clinton is now driving from New York to Iowa. It's been called the least-exciting spring break trip in history.

Hillary Clinton is trying an entirely different approach with Iowa than the one she tried eight years ago when she lost there. She will not start speeches by saying, 'Hello, Iowa, or Idaho, or whichever one you are.'

Chris Christie said he will top Donald Trump's Iowa State Fair helicopter entrance by riding in on a pony. As a result, all the ponies in Iowa have gone into hiding.

Newt Gingrich had a horrible week in the Iowa caucuses. Only 13 percent of his ex-wives voted for him.

I've been watching politics for 35 or 40 years and you just never know. You can have one person win the Iowa caucus and then the whole picture changes ten minutes later. The same thing can happen again after New Hampshire. I have no idea what's going to happen with our country in the future.

I have never understood the Iowa caucus.

No Republican has ever won South Carolina and Iowa or New Hampshire, as Trump has, without going on to win the nomination.

We have felt for some time that if political candidates or their staff are willing to make the pilgrimage to North Iowa, the least we can do is show hospitality. And it's also a wonderful way to get to know these people who make our political system work.

Hillary Clinton is also not a very exciting, inspiring candidate to a lot of the left-leaning Democratic base, especially in Iowa.

In any year, the stats in Iowa show we are in a relatively safe location, but that can change dramatically; a lot of it depends on what travels through our campus.

I want to caucus in Iowa. I'll caucus all over the state. I don't caucus in California. You don't caucus where you live. It doesn't look good.

I'm happy wherever I go, whatever I do. I'm happy in Iowa, I'm happy here in California.

You see for me, America is an idea. It is a stage for transformation. I felt when I came to Iowa City from Calcutta that suddenly I could be a new person . . . What America offers me is romanticism and hope . . . Suddenly, I found myself in a country where

I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, 'By the time you get this, Daddy, I'll already be Mrs. Blaise!'

Iowans are feeling the pinch of a big federal government, and elected officials like Bruce Braley keep championing the over reaching bureaucracy. Iowans know what is best for Iowa more than Washington politicians and bureaucrats do.

When I went to the University of Iowa in order to be a writer, I thought, This is the worst way to learn how to write. To sit in a room with a bunch of would-be writers, who want to write the Great American Novel, every one of them, and you read their stories and they read yours, and you're not living a life. I don't like that. I like learning on the job. The character of my work has definitely evolved from the character of my life.

I'm an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.

you are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always very well taken care of if you come from Iowa.

John Kerry was the big winner in Iowa. Ted Kennedy introduced Kerry as the 'comeback kid.' That used to be Bill Clinton's name - because every time he would come back to a city, he would find out if he had a kid or not.

In the Iowa senate, I helped pass the largest tax cut in state history - returning over four billion dollars in savings and putting more money back in the pockets of hard-working Iowa families.

I love mythology, grew up loving it. I'm a middle kid, big family, that's the thing you did in the farm country. I lived in Iowa, I loved mythology. I don't know, we're like that.

Let us tackle the big issues with bold ideas that transform Iowa to accomplish our shared mission to grow Iowa, and realize our shared vision of Iowa as the best place to live, work and raise a family.

I watched what this man [Cruz] did to Dr. Ben Carson, who I respect, in Iowa, where he said that Ben Carson is out of the race - he has left Iowa and he's out of the race. And I thought it was disgraceful.

Look what Ted Cruz did with Ben Carson, who's endorsed me, a great guy. Look what he did to Ben Carson. He said that Ben Carson in Iowa has left, he's out of the campaign, vote for me. Thousands of people voted for him because he convinced people that Ben Carson had left the campaign.

If that's how it all started, then we might as well face the fact that what's left out there is a great deal of shrapnel and a whole bunch of cinders (one of which is, fortunately, still hot enough and close enough to be good for tanning). Trying to find some sense and order in this mess may be as futile as trying to ... reconstruct the economy of Iowa from a bowl of popcorn. [On searching for evidence of the Big Bang.]

CNN recently ran a sort of roundup article on why some conservatives say that Trump talk is fascist. The roundup included this tweet from Iowa Republican radio host, very influential guy in Iowa Republican caucuses, Steve Deace. Quote, "If [Barack] Obama proposed the same religion registry as Trump, every conservative in the country would call it what it is - creeping fascism."

When I left Iowa, I definitely never wanted to stand in front of a group of academics again and see if they approved of me. I made up my mind to take my work to the actual reading public.

All the historians are Harvard people. It just isn't fair. Poor old Hoover from West Branch, Iowa, had no chance with that crowd;nor did Andrew Jackson from Tennessee. Nor does Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas. It just isn't fair.

Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.

In the past, in order to continue as a candidate, a serious candidate, you had to be in the top three finishes in Iowa. You had to be in the top two out of New Hampshire. All our presidents elected in the past half-century finished either first or second in New Hampshire and in the top three in Iowa. That changed with the Citizens United, when we gave unlimited amounts of money.

A man from Iowa or Illinois will say 'I'm from the Middle West'..a Georgian or a Mississipian may admit to being merely a Southerner...but no Texan, given the opportunity, ever said otherwise than 'I'm from Texas'.

Taking a scenic route in Southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances.

Quality, affordable housing is a key element of a strong and secure Iowa.

I get emails from students at programs all over the country who want to transfer to Iowa, and in most cases their frustrations have absolutely nothing to do with the programs they're attending. They have to do with the growing pains that they're undergoing as writers and with the growing pains that our own genre is constantly undergoing.

When I left the University of Iowa and made the decision to come to Rutgers, I said to my athletic director, as both of us stood there crying, 'I wish I could just take Iowa to the East Coast. That would be the best of all worlds.' Of course, I couldn't. I have the best of all worlds now by being at Rutgers, being in this part of the country and being able to embrace and receive the great prestige that is part of the Big Ten.