When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.

I love New York, and I'm drawn to a certain intensity of life, but I've just never felt like I want to escape from the Midwest. A writer lives a great deal in his own head, and so one intuitively finds places where your head is more clear. New York for me is one of those places.

A cruise ship is a floating town of lazy people.

I thought A Prairie Home Companion would be an interesting thing to do for a summer or so. Public radio was just seven years old in 1974. It was a tiny organization in which a lot of things got started simply because there was all this time to fill. If you wanted to do an hour on Lithuanian folk dancing, you probably could have done it.

The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose.

It's confidence; it has to be something good about getting old. One of the things is that you just don't stress about some stuff that made you so worried.

I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved.