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

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."

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

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.

more to be a human being with

You can always judge a man by what he eats, and therefore a country in which there is no free lunch is no longer a free country.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

I try not to fake anything.

The game asks that you work to improve, that you put something into it, and that you also give something back to it. The game is universal. It is a language that unites all of us.

There will be no good business unless the majority comes to agree that we should demand more from business than large quarterly returns.

An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

A fine woman shews her charms to most advantage when she seems most to conceal them. The finest bosom in nature is not so fine as what imagination forms.

And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price.

Half the people who snuff people, that's what they want: recognition. Get their picture in the paper.