Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.

That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

We do not know the details in a day. How can we foretell the happenings in distant time.

Bolivian women sewed their lips shut for days. They threaded needles through their skin to stop their speech, to show what good speaking had done them.

It’s amazing what you can do when you stop worrying about failing.

Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self.

Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance.

My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year.

Go somewhere. Do something. How can you stay in one spot when the world is so big

When you can’t do something truly useful, you tend to vent the pent up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.

I love "30 Rock" because Tina Fey allows me to fly over the cuckoo nest once a week.

Since day one my thing has always been to play the music