My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.

Like Neanderthals, men prefer to hunt alone or, if in a pack, at the head of it. Women, whether in the field or in a campfire, are collaborative, and when they hunt...they work together.

Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.

Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It's done all right on its own so far.

The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

Love is like a brick. You can build a house, or you can sink a dead body.

Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.

Falling asleep with hopes and wishes that I rarely get to hold in my hand for long…go me. All I’ve got are memories and secrets.

To every rule there is an exception—and an idiot ready to demonstrate it. Don't be the one!

It helps to be able to be alone. 'Cuz writing is done alone, unless you collaborate, but I don't do that. Ask my ex-wife.

As you become more conscious of your body as eternity, a sense of ease, a fullness beyond description occurs.

To achieve great things we must be self-confined...mastery is revealed in limitation.

I knew that if I was going to write a book, I was going to have to read one, too.

Once allow your soul to be disturbed by any violent emotion and, like the waters of a tempest-tossed lake, it can no longer reflect the divine Image.

Making a better tomorrow, tomorrow.