I want to resume the life of a shy person.

Those people on daytime TV talking about how their parents never gave them the positive feedback they needed and that's why they shot them- those are not Minnesotans.

... life itself is brief, and that is what charges the day with such ridiculous beauty.

Your life is a work of art, and in the end, the underlying theme of great art is bravery and hope and love.

Where I'm from we don't trust paper. Wealth is what's here on the premises. If I open a cupboard and see, say, thirty cans of tomato sauce and a five-pound bag of rice, I get a little thrill of well-being - much more so than if I take a look at the quarterly dividend report from my mutual fund.

I think that if writers are tempted to do other things, they ought to go do other things. They should not write if they don't feel like it. I say this as a competitor. I am not interested in encouraging people who are in competition with me.

I was an English major at the University of Minnesota, and I was very shy, which many people misinterpreted as intelligence. On the basis of that wrong impression, I became the editor of the campus literary magazine.