Ian Frazier Quotations

America to me is so varied and exciting. I always feel nostalgia for the place I'm not in, and then I get there and find myself in a traffic jam going into the Lincoln Tunnel, and I think, 'God, why was I romanticizing this part of the country?' I think it has to do with the romantic, unrealistic temperament.

On two or three book tours, I have visited bookstores in the Mall of America and signed copies of my books and introduced myself to store employees who I hope will sell them.

I would hate to see the idea of freedom disappear, and I wonder if maybe it will.

I believe that when Crazy Horse was killed, something more than a man's life was snuffed out.

With reporting, if you work hard, you can usually pull something out. But writing humor doesn't respond to working hard, necessarily. I mean, you could just sit there and look at the page all day and maybe something will come.

You can find dozens of books about people taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad. I knew I had to do something different to cross Siberia. To drive and to talk with people along the way, that was how I wrote my book 'Great Plains'. I drove and camped in Siberia, but did not have a real program.

Russia has always had a global history. Global history is a bummer. You suffer invasions of all different kinds. And Russia was not defended against them.

Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can.

Roy Blount is so funny, and he sounds like he's just talking, and the next thing you know he has tossed off an essay as elegant and intricately structured as a birdsong. His ear for American speech is better than anybody's.

There's an idea of the Plains as the middle of nowhere, something to be contemptuous of. But it's really a heroic place.