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I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.

Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It's present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I'm back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction.

I love the Midwest. I think about it every day. I wonder if I would rather have a little farm in the Midwest, in Illinois or Wisconsin, or would I rather have like a little getaway up in the mountains of Colorado.

I have a strange fascination with the Midwest. I'm waiting to find out that my parents are actually from the Midwest. I grew up in Beverly Hills, up the street, and I just feel comfortable there. I've shot in Minneapolis, in Detroit, in St. Louis, in Omaha - they would say they're the Plains, not the Midwest - and I love it.

I come from Chicago, and the landscape of the Midwest has always meant a great deal to me.

I'm from the South, so while I personally find it impossible to live there, I still have a fondness for it as a geographical region.

Peoria is such a seemingly quintessential American city, and I had always wanted to draw on that in either my fiction or in nonfiction. The Midwest is also a landscape that I have always been infatuated with, perhaps because it's the first one I can truly remember.

I'm a Midwesterner.

Being in the Midwest, you get the best of all worlds and add your own flavor to it.

It's the friends that make you survive this flat place called the Midwest.