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

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 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.

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.

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

I was to discover that the quest for human understanding is a lifetime one that has no end in sight.

Don't matter how much money you got, there's only two kinds of people: there's saved people and there's lost people.

Had it been in the Old Testament Harry Potter would have been put to death.

Crying wolf is a real danger.

I think we are living in pretty scary times and people are looking for inspiration and are also more open to the spiritual possibilities.

We adore Thee most holy Lord Jesus Christ, here in all Thy Churches, which are in the whole world, because by Thy holy cross, Thou hast redeemed the world

Oh, yes--you can shout me down, I know! But you cannot answer me. The majority has might on its side--unfortunately; but right it has not.

I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg.

Instead, we just sat there, together but really apart, watching a show about a stranger and all her secrets, while keeping our own to ourselves, as always.

Around it are those countries which, according to History, constitute the civilised world ie, a world that can support historians