I love Louisiana fried fish, but it's all Martin Luther King, I can't go over there.
Whatever story you're telling in Louisiana, the landscape is going to become a character in it.
When the savages of Louisiana wish to have fruit, they cut the tree at the bottom and gather the fruit. That is exactly a despotic government.
My great-grandchildren will not be able to enjoy the Gulf Coast of Louisiana the way I have.
Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.
We were out there with the people whose homes were flooded out in Southern Louisiana. We are out there on the front line with everyday people fighting the real frontline battle that real Americans are fighting.
I remember what it was like in the 1960's in rural Louisiana. Women did not have many options. My own best friend in high school had a baby at 16. I don't want us to go back to those days.
My SUV, assuming Hummer comes out with a model for those who find the current ones too cramped, will look something like the Louisiana Superdome on wheels. It'll guzzle so much gas as I walk out to my driveway there will be squads of Saudi princes gaping and applauding. It'll come, when I buy it, with little Hondas and Mazdas already embedded in the front grillwork.
I'm not going to lay down in words the lure of this place. Every great writer in the land, from Faulkner to Twain to Rice to Ford, has tried to do it and fallen short. It is impossible to capture the essence, tolerance, and spirit of south Louisiana in words and to try is to roll down a road of clichés, bouncing over beignets and beads and brass bands and it just is what it is. It is home.
I love Louisiana. It's amazing.
It was very interesting to me that when Louisiana was destroyed in that flood the fundamentalists were very quick to say, it's the punishment of God on a sinful city. Now that the oil industry has been so hard hit in Galveston, are they up on their pulpits saying, God is punishing the oil industry? No, no, no!
That [Louisiana culture] was all very new to me. I read books and watched documentaries, just trying to immerse myself.
While we've doubled renewable energy, it was only a tiny portion of the energy portfolio to start with. But what we did was totally take the lid off fossil fuel extractions in every way imaginable. On the day following [Barack] Obama's trip to the Louisiana floods, you know, we had, I think, another 25 million acres that went on sale in the Gulf for further extraction.
I like to think that people can see that and appreciate that idea and then, by some mechanism of wearing the fragrance, sort of carry that idea with them in their own life. Whether it's a weekend in Louisiana or in New York City or in Venice, Italy, or wherever they may be. I think there's something kind of fascinating and powerful about that.
Here's what I've found in Louisiana: The voters want to know what you believe, what you stand for, and what you plan to do, not what shade your skin is.
I come to writing from hearing great stories as a child in Louisiana, where the mark of a person was his or her ability to be a raconteur. I also come to writing as a professional actress whose body has been trained to listen and smell and inhabit characters without judgment.
The crisis is not an opportunity to change the character of Louisiana's political order. We must not use the crisis to turn Louisiana into a red state -- this is a rainbow state.
The shell fishing industry represents a major part of Louisiana's economy.
There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana
One of these days the people of Louisiana are going to get good government - and they aren't going to like it.
