When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.
I lived in Chicago for a few years and got a sense of - kind of that broad-shouldered, windy, um, stern, Midwestern, warm-slash-passive aggressive, wonderful - every adjective I can think of, very cold.
Cleveland, city of light! City of magic!
Chicago - it's the Midwest, and the people are not as tough or not as edgy as they are in New York.
Chicago still remains a Mecca of the Midwest - people from both coasts are kind of amazed how good life is in Chicago and what a good culture we've got. You can have a pretty wonderful artistic life and never leave Chicago.
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.
Chicago is seriously my favorite city in the country. People have roots here, which is nice. When you go to Los Angeles, no one is actually from Los Angeles.
Indianapolis is a great Midwestern city. Great people. Warm, friendly people.
The thing about Chicago is that it really isn't like any other place. The architecture and the layout of the city are the best. I'm from the Midwest, and consider myself a Midwesterner. I feel most at home there. I love California. I have great friends in California. I just have always considered Illinois to be home.
I love the Midwest accent.
I've been to Iowa many times before. You have to love Iowa, or you're not an American.
Peoria is such a seemingly quintessential American city, and I had always wanted to draw on that in either my fiction or in nonfiction. The Midwest is also a landscape that I have always been infatuated with, perhaps because it's the first one I can truly remember.
I have no idea why we bleed maize and blue, but we do. There's something about Michigan. Maybe it's that we're less jaded out there in the Midwest, I don't know, but it's a love of what we do and each other that brings us together. It's just a magic place.
