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

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.

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

Help when you can. Give what you have. Do what you must. Be who you ought to be.

If I only looked at what I've lost, I'd never be able to see what I have.

There's nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friends.

I'm trying to move an aircraft carrier here, I'm not just steering the speedboat.

The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.

One always overcompensates for disabilities. I'm thinking of having my entire body surgically removed.

The members of the Mystery school, during the time of Atlantis, had psychically seen the subsequent ages of darkness.

It was 1967, and the hippie thing was happening. I got into experimenting with drugs while I was in college in Michigan.

Examine the platforms of both parties. Examine the character of both parties. Get down on your knees. Say, Lord, help me make this decision. And then go vote.

Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.