Dinaw Mengestu Quotes

I feel very Midwestern at my core.

I've been to Iowa many times before. You have to love Iowa, or you're not an American.

Hollywood so often likes to make movies that are just about itself. I felt there were a lot of stories that were yet to be told in the middle of the country, and I wanted to capture some of that beauty.

There is something about Midwest in general, that has kind of an underdog quality.

First of all, I'm a Midwesterner, being from Kansas, and Chicago is basically a big Midwestern cow town. It was built from the stockyards, and everyone is very friendly, and it's at the edge of the tallgrass prairie. There's just a good feel to it.

At my core, I'm a Midwesterner.

I'm a Midwesterner.

I'm from the Midwest.

It's rural America. It's where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America.

To them, the real United States is just flyover country.

You can take the boy out of the Midwest, but you can't take the Midwest out of the boy.

Reagan grows up in 1920s Dixon, Illinois, and it's the heartland of America. It's a time when Americans are particularly drawn to this small town world because it's beginning to pass.

I kind of cherish at least the idea of Midwestern candor and openness. But I couldn't live there.

I think my songs are singing to the rural heart. It's not whether you're from a big city or the middle of nowhere in a small town.

I love the Midwest accent.

I love so many cheeses. I like them hard and soft. I like cream cheese; I like cottage cheese... I'm a true Midwesterner.

I'm an upstate New York lifer.

You go down South, and they're quirky; they have culture, and it's not uniformly true of our country. Our country has gotten a little blanded out, big sections of it. Even if you disagree with the politics, you have to appreciate the cuisine, the music, the literature.

I grew up in the Midwest. I understand a sense of the small-town mentality, small-town social politics.

The thing about Springsteen, his music, although he's writing about, you know, New Jersey and Asbury Park, all of them places, it's blue-collar towns that, like - it's similar to Newcastle, where I'm from.

I don't think the real America is in New York or on the Pacific Coast; personally, I like the Middle West much better, places like North and South Dakota, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. There, I think, are the true Americans

I'm not sure what the proper label might be, or the most accurate one, but someone once called my stuff Southern Ohio Gothic and I thought that was fair.

I want to make more films in the heartland, the forgotten America.

I absorbed the vinyl of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Jack Elliott, to Michael McClure and then into the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg. At campus, we were absorbing that stuff. We looked to America.

I've always been in love with the States. When I was a kid, we would take these long summer holidays in Texas, Nashville, and all over. I fell in love with the people, the food, even the smell. You don't necessarily get that in old Europe.