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.

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

We have something very valuable, for which we have not yet found an application in this life

They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

No one questions the fact that verbal language has to be learned, but the commonplaceness of visual experience betrays art; people tend to assume that, because they can see, they can see art.

All chronic and degenerative diseases are caused by two and only two major problems, toxicity and deficiency.

We are so busy doing the urgent that we don't have time to do the important.

Bruce Parker's The Power of the Sea is an engaging and essential history of science. It’s also a terrific account of survival on our wild blue planet.

You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.

[On the camel:] Its weak point is its morale, and it is here that so much depends on its human master. Discouragement is fatal ... it loses heart, sinks by the wayside and dies.

I auditioned for the role of an angel in the Nativity play at school. I didn't get it. I auditioned for Mary; didn't get it. So I made up the character of the sheep who sat next to Baby Jesus.

I ask no risen dust to teach me immortality; I am conscious of eternal life.