A Quote by Dan O'Brien

You can only look forward to a South Dakota winter if, as with childbirth, remodeling a house, or writing a novel, you're able to forget how bad it was the last time.
Not only are we going to New Hampshire ... we're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we're going to California and Texas and New York! And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we're going to Washington, D.C. to take back the White House, Yeeeeeaaaaaargh!
Babies are born bow-legged in South Dakota. By the age of 12, they can purchase guns. At 14, they can take their driving test. Fortunately, since the geographical area of South Dakota can accommodate both France and Germany, but has a population of only 750,000, the chances of hitting anything are pretty slim.
Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.
In 1988, as an unknown candidate, totally unknown, I won Iowa, came in second in New Hampshire, won South Dakota. I was ahead in every Super Tuesday state the day after South Dakota. The only problem was I didn't have enough money. I had a million dollars left, and Al Gore had three and Michael Dukakis had three and it was lights out.
The deal we made was that if we would change our law to invite them to come to South Dakota - that's what they wanted, the invitation - if we would change our law to invite them to come to South Dakota, he would guarantee South Dakota 400 Citibank jobs.
If you knew the upward mobility that South Dakota's kids have gotten from the opportunity to intern and to work and to be employed and to have upward mobility in that company and move on, it's been phenomenal for South Dakota.
Coming from a small South Dakota school, it was a different route to get to the NFL. I went from South Dakota State to the World League of American Football with the Amsterdam Admirals, and fortunately I did well enough there that the New England Patriots decided to sign me and give me a chance.
Why die on Mars when you can live in South Dakota? South Dakota, you can live here.
I'm sure that they will continue to look for ways to try and undermine my support, but I have every confidence that in doing this job for South Dakota, I will continue to build on my support and be able to succeed once again in November.
Writing a novel isn't like building a brick wall. You don't figure out how to do it, and then it gets easier each time because you know what you're doing. With writing a novel, you have to figure it out each time. Each time you start over, you just have the language and the idea and the hope.
It was the coldest winter ever! I thought last winter was the coldest winter ever, but I was wrong now wasn't I? You see because I travel all the time. So last winter, I'd be in the midwest, and the blizzard would hit. And then I'd fly home, and the blizzard would hit again!
If I'm writing a novel, I'll probably get up in the morning, do email, perhaps blog, deal with emergencies, and then be off novel-writing around 1.00pm and stop around 6.00pm. And I'll be writing in longhand, a safe distance from my computer. If I'm not writing a novel, there is no schedule, and scripts and introductions and whatnot can find themselves being written at any time and on anything.
I went to a job and sat down as a proper apprentice, learning how to make jewelry. It involved a lot of remodeling and repairing. It was a bad time in England in those days and people didn't have much money - they would repair a ring rather than buy a new one. They would thicken up the gold. I learned all the ways to make something look new again.
In a movie, that's the only time when you're allowed these kind of fantasies to be lived. Being able to look so cool and be able to fight five bad guys and take them down. When can you do that?
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
Working on my first novel, 'Groundswell' - about a woman recovering from a bad breakup who falls in love with surfing - I spent a month south of the border. And when I wasn't writing or surfing, I was eating. A lot.
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