A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.

The first Chapter Law is, "Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it."

Having grown up in Oklahoma when it was one of the last states which prohibited liquor, I grew up with War On Drugs, where every teenager knew who the bootleggers were

I know what I write about seems exotic to a lot of people, but not for me. I pulled up to an old trading post and saw a few elderly Navajos sitting on a bench. I felt right at home.

IF you are not for yourself, who will be for you? If you are only for yourself, what are you? If not now, when?

Thoughts, and words that spring from them, bend the individual's reality. To speak of death is to invite it. To think of sorrow is to produce it.

I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.

I try to make my books reflect humanity as I see it.

Loneliness is more painful than being hurt

I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.

... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.

Time changes every man. Unusual circumstances change them in unusual ways

If you don't feel comfortable in a plunging sweater, skin-tight jeans and killer heels, go home and change.

There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things.

You can't be normal and expect abnormal returns.

Once a happy old man One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.

Thou beginnest better than thou endest. The last is inferior to the first. [Lat., Coepisti melius quam desinis. Ultima primis cedunt.]

Maybe some things that weren't so great were said about the Irish when they came. But Americans've done well by absorbing immigrants and it's made our nation stronger.