The first Chapter Law is, "Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it."

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.

Having grown up in Oklahoma when it was one of the last states which prohibited liquor, I grew up with War On Drugs, where every teenager knew who the bootleggers were

A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.

I know what I write about seems exotic to a lot of people, but not for me. I pulled up to an old trading post and saw a few elderly Navajos sitting on a bench. I felt right at home.

IF you are not for yourself, who will be for you? If you are only for yourself, what are you? If not now, when?

Thoughts, and words that spring from them, bend the individual's reality. To speak of death is to invite it. To think of sorrow is to produce it.

I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.

I try to make my books reflect humanity as I see it.

Most people around here prefer undead drivers, so I never get a chance to make any money on steady contracts.

The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.

Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.

When I was a kid growing up in New York, I was pretty unaware of racism. I think when we're young - before we lose our innocence - we're sort of unaware of the more flawed qualities of each other.

I just love music generally. If you come to my house I always have music playing.

Whenever there is a a financial crisis, it is always the banks that get hit.

Your past doesn't define you. Only your present and your future. If your life is screwed up, stop making excuses. What are you going to do about it today?

Time eventually convinces most of us that forgiveness is a virtue. Conveniently, cowardice and forgiveness look identical at a certain distance.

Your style is the way you talk in paint.

To hear complaints with patience, even when complaints are vain, is one of the duties of friendship.