It’s rural America. It’s where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America.

I realized I was a country person – I’m just not used to small spaces.

Millions of us, myself included, go back generations in this country, with ancestors who put in the painstaking work to become citizens. So we don’t like the notion that anyone might get a free pass to American citizenship.

Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows – and china.

I just owe almost everything to my father and it’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.

If a small-town boy like me who bagged groceries was able to make his dreams come true, you can too.

Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that.

What is a farm but a mute gospel?

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.

I was definitely very much a country boy.

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.

I was from a small town, and nobody really expects you to leave, especially before you graduate. That doesn’t happen.

Let’s be honest – tracking down, rounding up, and deporting millions of people isn’t realistic. Anyone who suggests otherwise isn’t being straight with you. It’s also not who we are as Americans.

When I came to Johannesburg from the countryside, I knew nobody, but many strangers were very kind to me. I then was dragged into politics, and then, subsequently, I became a lawyer.

The American people abhor a vacuum.

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.

It’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.

I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly, and that is small-town, middle-class southern life.

I think any life can be interesting, any surroundings can be interesting. I don’t think I could have been so brave if I had been living in a town, competing with people on what can be called a generally higher cultural level.

I’m just a simple country girl.

There’s very little dislike of Americans in the world, shown by repeated polls, and the dissatisfaction – that is, the hatred and the anger – they come from acceptance of American values, not a rejection of them, and recognition that they’re rejected by the U.S. government and by U.S. elites, which does lead to hatred and anger.

I see Americans of every party, every background, every faith who believe that we are stronger together: black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American; young, old; gay, straight; men, women, folks with disabilities, all pledging allegiance under the same proud flag to this big, bold country that we love. That’s what I see. That’s the America I know!

I want a president who will teach our children that everyone in this country matters, a president who truly believes in the vision that our Founders put forth all those years ago that we are all created equal, each a beloved part of the great American story.

Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today; for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.

The overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.

There’s a lot of rednecks in the country where I grew up.