Quotes & Sayings About Iowa City

When I say that I went to grad school in Iowa City, people often assume that I went to the famed writers' workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa. I didn't. I got a master's in journalism. — Chelsea Cain

Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she'd ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie (when she got to the real Fifth Avenue, she wasn't very impressed, because the Country Club Plaza had spoiled her). — Jane Smiley

I was born in Iowa City and spent my early childhood on a hippie commune just outside of town. — Chelsea Cain

Lucas was starting to feel like a yo-yo, and Iowa City was the finger. — John Sandford

Don't ever die, Juan Diego had written to Brother Pepe from Iowa City. What Juan Diego meant was that HE would die if he lost Pepe. — John Irving

I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun. But I really love Durham more than any place I've ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world. — John Darnielle

One August morning at Blair House, he read in the papers that the body of an American soldier killed in action, Sergeant John Rice, had been brought home for burial in Sioux City, Iowa, but that at the last moment, as the casket was to be lowered into the grave, officials of the Sioux City Memorial Park had stopped the ceremony because Sergeant Rice, a Winnebago Indian, was not "a member of the Caucasian race" and burial was therefore denied. Outraged, Truman picked up the phone. Within minutes, by telephone and telegram, it was arranged that Sergeant Rice would be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors and that an Air Force plane was on the way to bring his widow and three children to Washington. That, as President, was the least he could do. — David McCullough

Branch is stuck all right. He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. [ ... ] There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred. — Don DeLillo

I lived in a small city on the Mississippi River across from Iowa, so I didn't have a country upbringing, but in high school we would go drink kegs in cornfields. — Lissie

I still believe in you, as a writer, but the only stuff we ever had in common doesn't travel very far."
"What stuff is that?" he'd asked her.
"We're completely at ease being naked in front of strangers and total fuckheads", she'd told him. Maybe that's part of what being a writer entails, Danny Baciagalupo found himself thinking on that rainy spring night in Iowa city. — John Irving

If you grow corn or trade in pigs or write poetry then you go to Iowa City." "That's why I haven't been. — Ann Patchett

Omaha, Nebraska. Sac City, Iowa. Alexandria, Indiana. Darwin, Minnesota. Hollywood, California. Alliance, Nebraska. — John Green

I was never happier than on the nights we stayed home, lying on the living room rug. We talked about classes and poetry and politics and sex. Neither of us were in love with the Iowa Writers' Workshop, but it didn't really matter because we had no place else to go. What we had was the little home we made together, our life in the ugly green duplex. We lived next door to a single mother named Nancy Tate who was generous in all matters. She would drive us to the grocery store and give us menthol cigarettes and come over late at night after her son was asleep to sit in our kitchen and drink wine and talk about Hegel and Marx. Iowa City in the eighties was never going to be Paris in the twenties, but we gave it our best shot. — Ann Patchett

I grew up in Washington State and then eventually found my way back to Iowa City for grad school. — Chelsea Cain

So I've come to Chicago to have a drink," he said. "I'm living in Iowa City for now. Have you ever been to Iowa City?" "I — Ann Patchett

In certain parts of the world - where I'm at right now in New York, you're going to pay a whole lot more. In Los Angeles, your average starter home is a million dollars. So I need more money in Los Angeles to live like a normal person. If I live in another city, Iowa maybe, I wouldn't need as much. — Karrine Steffans

Surely it's better to live in the country, to live on a prairie by a drawing of rivers, in Iowa or Illinois or Indiana, say, than in any city, in any stinking fog of human beings, in any blooming orchard of machines. It ought to be. — William H Gass

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. — Jay Leno

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 — Bharati Mukherjee

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. — Meredith Willson

Iowa City is okay as Midwestern cities go, but there's no food, no culture, no ocean. — Elin Hilderbrand