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

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.

If you think people in your life are normal, then you undoubtedly have not spent any time getting to know the abnormal side of them.

Indomitable will, purposeful action

Be peaceful like a mountain. Be loving like a flower. Be wonderous like thunder.

Indecisiveness wears a person out.

This is something everyone knows: A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe.

Let us no more contend, nor blame each other, blamed enough elsewhere, but strive, In offices of love, how we may lighten each other's burden.

People are always talking about the joys of youth-but, oh, how youth can suffer!

God will not punish the man Who makes return for an injury.

A man came round in hospital after a serious accident. He shouted, "Doctor, doctor, I can't feel my legs!" The doctor replied, "I know you can't, I had to amputate your arms"

Thy best of rest is sleep, And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st Thy death, which is no more.