I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.

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 try to make my books reflect humanity as I see it.

The power of the pen is landmark of life.

Accounts are not quite settled between us," said she, with a passion that equaled my own. "I can love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now you must test the other.

Thus strength is afforded by good and thorough customs, thus is learnt the subjection of the individual, and strenuousness of character becomes a birth gift and afterwards is fostered as a habit.

My own remedy is always to eat, just before I step into bed, a hot roasted onion, if I have a cold.

I got mugged. And they got my knapsack with my comedy notebook in it. So if anybody see two cholos bombing at the Funny Bone chain, that would be them. Just give me a jingle.

I liked the ceremony, the ritual of preparing cocaine, as much as doing it. I did it for a year, loved it, then stopped. Now I feel the same way about cooking.

If I cannot smoke in heaven, then I shall not go.

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.

It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.

I've always found it necessity to strip away everything but the most fundamental ways to work - the rest is style.