Regional Perspectives Quotes

I think the sensibilities of having grown up in Upstate New York and the concerns, the fears, the hopes of the people there are reflected all over the country.

We have had a chance to travel to all 56 counties in this state, and I have had the chance to sit around with cups of coffee and having conversations about what matters to Montanans.

There are certainly days that we can convince ourselves in Washington that everybody's talking about one thing, and then I'll go home to my district and realize that everybody's actually talking about something different.

I don't know what's going on in America. I know what people in New York and Beverly Hills think about Whole Foods, but I don't know what people anywhere else think.

Immigration, of course, in New Hampshire is - it's not something that you see every day. It's not like talking about it in Texas, where people have a much more explicit sense of it.

I've driven all through America and I know there are a lot of clever people between the coasts. But they have a slightly old-fashioned view of the world. Whereas New York is one of the most multicultural, multiracial, tolerant places on Earth.

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

The travel that I've spent around the country, I always come back with ideas for L.A. and vice versa: My experiences in L.A. give me an immediacy to issues that sometimes people in Washington think about but aren't experiencing every day.

When you come from the Midwest, you have a more open mind than if you come from the West Coast or the East Coast.

I was born and raised in Manhattan; I didn't realize that I, in all my androgyny, was a freak to the rest of this country.

You know, Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don't know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore.

India to someone who lives in Lahore is like Queens to someone who lives in Lower Manhattan - it's not far away, and yet it doesn't exist.

In the beginning, I tried to be a more cosmopolitan writer, but I realized that I was a country boy, and I had to deal with things I knew about and where I came from.

Our interests are not the same as yours [the United States] because we are here and you are on the other side of the Atlantic.

There are so many stories from the Midwest that should be told. L.A. tells one story, and it's often about itself.

In the country in Kentucky, people are just amazed that anybody in New York wants to read about their lives.

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

Most Arabs and Muslims feel that the United States hasn't really been paying much attention to their desires. They think it has been pursuing its policies for its own sake and not according to many of the principles that it claims are its own - democracy, self-determination, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, international law.

The North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has not interest, and pretends none, in the mass of Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual.

A lot of the hesitancy to talk about the industry in real, concrete terms is not because of people being afraid of biting the hand that feeds them, and more about the fear that people in the middle of the country will not be interested.