I grew up thirty miles down the highway in San Marcos, and I've still got family there, so I guess I'm pretty well rooted.

It took me ten years to write The Night Journal, so that was a big ordeal.

I love Austin. It's great here. I don't mind the heat.

I love the writers in Austin. We stick together. We all like each other and go to each other's book signings in case no one else shows up.

When Larry Wright won the Pulitzer for The Looming Tower we all strutted around for weeks, until some sourpuss among us noted that it was actually Larry, and not the rest of us, who won the prize.

I'd be a dope to compare my writing with Wallace Stegner's, but that book probably influenced me in ways I didn't even realize while I was writing The Night Journal.

I got hooked on TV westerns back in the early sixties when I was about five, mostly because my brother was addicted to them and wouldn't let me watch anything else.

It seems like the Western genre has crept out of its casings during the last few years, and expanded to include books and movies we wouldn't originally have thought of as westerns.

The defining aspects of westerns are still pretty much in place - namely landscape and conflict. In other books the conflict can be internal, but in westerns it usually plays out on a big stage.

I think when you're a writer most of what you read influences you. The rhythms get into your head.

In middle school I wrote a paper on Hemingway and none of the sentences had more than five words.

Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither.

When you fall for your appetite too early, you may not be able to endure to the end.

Depression is a red herring, " said Nariman. "I think a lot about the past, it's true. But at my age, the past is more present than the here and now. and there is not much percentage in the future.

I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.

In essence, String Theory describes space and time, matter and energy, gravity and light, indeed all of God's creation... as music.

David Bentley has got balls - and plenty of them.

My vocals are bad, I can't sing, hey man, I wouldn't ask you to do a drum roll if your arm was falling off.

Age either transfigures or petrifies.

You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation.

Education is the transformation of civilisation