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The people in the Upper Midwest were the same kind of people I grew up around in Idaho.

We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn't know that we were any different from anybody else.

You know, when you're poor and you have a bunch of kids in your family, you don't know that everybody's not poor.

We are privileged. There are poor people out there. We must to do something to make them privileged.

In the West, we've lost our intuitive understanding of how poverty shapes thinking.

Appalachia, my state, eastern Kentucky, has a large amount of poverty.

There are 500,000 poor children in this state that did not choose to be poor, and we have to take care of them.

I tend to worry about the minutiae of life. But living in the mountains of Idaho and having retreated from fame, I am more in tune with life.

We definitely weren't poor growing up, but we weren't rich.