Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

If no one heard your sounds then you did not really make them.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

At 16, I dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a Trauma Centre before ultimately deciding to go to university.

Each time a high-wage job is lost, a family is turned upside down. And that affects the communities where they live.

My first published novel, American Rust, took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.

No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth.

You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.

No reprimand in the mirrorSlow walk to LiberiaSlow dance across the SaharaSlow unraveling of gray matter

Warp was important to Thom about two years ago when he was looking for different sounds.

When I come home, I'm not a basketball player, but "dad". While everyone sees me as an NBA player, to my boys, I'm just "dad" and that's very important.

Thank Heaven! The crisis /The danger is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last /, and the fever called ''Living'' is conquered at last.

When we know our strengths, we're more likely to use them.

I just stand there like a doofus wondering just what in the effing blazes is going on.

Wars shatter so many lives. I think especially of children robbed of their childhood.

If we are to overcome terrorism and violence, we need education. That is the only way we can win.

It's hard to make a book episodic.

In the [John F.] Kennedy case, I believe the absence of a conspiracy can be proved to a virtual certainty.