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

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.

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.

Borrow money only for an education that will yield enough of a return in the job market to allow you to pay your loans back.

Women have a predestination to suffering.

My husband is absolutely opposed to any negative campaigning at all.

Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.

Nature goes her own way, and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order.

Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds.

My heart is bursting at the thought of Al-Mahdi coming to set up a universal government of peace.

It's not government that makes business successful. It's not government investments that makes businesses grow and hire people.

Good leadership is always human. It takes time and energy. It is hard work. Which is why good leadership is so special when we find it.

Sometimes I wish I weren't famous.