Liz Benedict, a teacher of mine at Iowa, is the person who introduced me to James Salter's work.
When I was 12, I was living in Iowa, and I emailed so many wrestling schools, and one of them was actually in Boston. I joined it at 18 - the New England Pro Wrestling Academy. They were doing a fantasy camp. I was 17 about to turn 18. I told my mom, 'I'm 18 now. I just signed these papers by myself, and I'm going to do this.'
I'm happy wherever I go, whatever I do. I'm happy in Iowa, I'm happy here in California.
As the 29th state to join the United States of America, it is our turn to show the nation what represents Iowa. Our commitment to quality education, hard work, and small-town values are all represented in the Iowa quarter.
I was born in Chicago, then I spent most of my youth in Joliet, Illinois which is about thirty minutes south, and I went to a military academy for high school in Wisconsin. Then I went to college, on a basketball scholarship to a small school in Iowa, so I'm like Mr. Midwest.
I wasn't a kid who moved out from Iowa with aspirations of becoming a famous star - I was intrigued by the idea of filmmaking and by the idea of what it would be like to play a character in a movie.
My grandmother from Iowa, she is dancing in Heaven at the prospect that the next president of the United States is going to be Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Quality, affordable housing is a key element of a strong and secure Iowa.
There is a reality to the primary process, and you don't win primaries by being ahead in national polls. You win them by winning Iowa, by winning New Hampshire, by winning South Carolina, winning Florida.
Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we lived in a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where there were no churches.
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 call myself Zimerican. I was born in the Midwest to Zimbabwean parents. My father was a professor at Grinnell College in Iowa.
Everything I need to know, I learned in Iowa. I grew up here in Iowa.
Being from Iowa, I can tell you that Vegas is not normal.
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!'
If you want to be a comedian, go out. Do a week in Des Moines, Iowa. Try to make those people laugh.
I'm sort of a Southerner because those are my roots, but my parents are from Iowa.
Political pandering comes in all shapes and sizes, but every four years the presidential primary bring us in contact with its purest form - praising ethanol subsidies amid the corn fields of Iowa.
It's not enough to be a woman. You have to care about women's issues. And women's issues here in Iowa are that we have a strong economy. We have jobs that our sons and daughters can go off to someday. We have a great educational system. And women want strong national defense. We want to know that our families are going to be safe.
In Iowa, we take care of people. That's all I think I need to say.
Iowa voters are intelligent enough to make up their minds.
I'm 100% Norwegian. Three generations removed and all continuous inbreeding of Norwegian of Minnesota and Iowa, so I traveled to Norway before.
My mother - who's from Iowa - owns and runs her own day-care centre, while my father's a developer. And my musical influences, I think, came from my father's side of the family.
By the time I land in Iowa, I feel like my mind is more open to the reality of being back home and focusing on the problems of the people in my district.
Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for 'Rookie'.
I think the only real knowledge I had before I went to Iowa was what I learned from 'Food Inc'. But once I got there and developed these extensive relationships with the farmers, I realized that we're basically made of corn.
When you live in a small town like Iowa Falls, there's not a lot to do, so we would, as a family, watch a ton of films.
I was getting a lot of good work with my wrestling up in Iowa, but I needed a more all-around game, striking, jiu-jitsu at a high level. I had a lot of good coaches out at ATT to work with. They pushed me. Everything was smarter. Everything was precise.
In some communities it is - like, for me, coming out with my parents, they were not accepting; they were not understanding. So it depends. For kids in New York and L.A., maybe it's different, but for kids in Iowa, for kids in Tennessee, it's still something that's not really talked about.
One of the first things I bought when I made 'Roseanne Show' money was a farm in Iowa.
I write to be read. I'm quite direct about that. I'm not writing to thrill colleagues or to impress the professors at the University of Iowa; that's not my goal.
As we grow up, we're constantly defining ourselves. In my case: Caucasian, male, born in Iowa, live in Boston, Zen Buddhist, good at learning languages. With countless labels, I build up this creation I call my self.
I like Iowa. I know Iowa. I've spent some time in Iowa. Good people in Iowa. It's a great state.
In Vegas, you have an audience you can't find anywhere else. It's from all over the country. You play Seattle, everyone's from Seattle. But in Vegas, you have six from Seattle, a bunch from L.A., some local Las Vegans and maybe a farmer from Iowa. In Vegas, you learn the ins and outs of holding a room because of that great spectrum of folks.
When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.
