My first published novel, American Rust, took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.

Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

At 16, I dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a Trauma Centre before ultimately deciding to go to university.

Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live.

No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth.

You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.

You are the illness I will never cure. You are the poem I will never write. You are the thought I will never finish. You are the text I will never read.

It is the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from followers.

A small boat that sails the river is better than a large ship that sinks in the sea.

It's just a matter of understanding what's necessary and discipline yourself to do it.

My mom once told me that a good relationship isn't where the other person makes you feel better, but where they make *you* better.

Wrote my first "novel" when I was six. Studied a bit in college, but then pursued history... But when I started writing professionally, it was mostly learn as you go.

Intellectual isolation always follows commercial isolation.

Remember that all the others are more afraid than you

I'm not going to beat somebody up for talking smack to me, especially another skater.

The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes, it's just a gloss. I mean, they're small, and they have the archetype. They're more like leprechauns, and this maybe raises a racial issue.