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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Unresolved issues from childhood revisit us in adulthood.

I want to do it because I want to do it.

Mark Twain's Roughing It is a book that many people don't know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age.

I wanted to change my name to Romeo Florentino. Romeo Florentino - that's a good fighter's name.

The Australian temper is at bottom grim. It is as though the sun has dried up his nature.

When I work, I really try to get absorbed in the character. Unless I want to do something playful with the camera, I'm not too worried about where the camera is or positions.

When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.

Life is like a box of terrible analogies.

Architecture is bound to situation. And I feel like the site is a metaphysical link, a poetic link, to what a building can be.

The way you see things - your attitude - is the most important factor in your success.