Writing a book is not as tough as it is to haul thirty-five people around the country and sweat like a horse five nights a week.
Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.
Quite often I can be in a bookshop, standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham, yet no one recognises me. I often say I’m a famous author in a country where no one reads.
I always spend time exploring the customs and attitudes of the countries I’m using for locations, and interviewing the people who live there. I’ve visited over 90 countries thus far.
Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.
Stood for his country’s glory fast, And nailed her colors to the mast!
Land of my sires! what mortal hand Can e’er untie the filial band That knits me to thy rugged strand!
My foot is on my native heath, and my name is MacGregor.
But woe awaits a country when She sees the tears of bearded men.
Either the USSR was not the country of socialism, in which case socialism didn’t exist anywhere and doubtless, wasn’t possible: or else, socialism was that, this abominable monster, this police state, the power of beasts of prey.
Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.
Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.
The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say.
The logic behind patriotism is a mystery. At least a man who believes that his own family or clan is superior to all others is familiar with more than 0.000003% of the people involved.
I certainly think Obama is the most hopeful president I’ve seen in the country since John Kennedy.
Once upon a time we were all born, popped out like jelly rolls forgetting our fishdom, the pleasuring seas, the country of comfort, spanked into the oxygens of death...
Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?
When old settlers say ‘One has to understand the country,’ what they mean is, ‘You have to get used to our ideas about the native.’ They are saying in effect, ‘Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don’t want you.’
At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
I couldn’t do country, with all due respect to all country music artists. My parents dressed me up with a cowboy hat and we’d go to the rodeo when I was younger and it traumatized me for life.