The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of rearing and peering from the bent tip of a grass blade, looking for a route.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order.

The only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate.

What matters is not publication or success (success is bad for your prose) but the practice of the imaginative act. Our damaged values depend on it.

Part of the trouble is that I've never properly understood that some disasters accumulate, that they don't all land like a child out of an apple tree.

In Literature, only trouble is interesting.

I sit and pass judgment on myself: this is dull, this is unclear, this is insignificant: ergo I am dull, I am unclear, I am insignificant.

What is the pattern of change?

If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background, and as in a painting's composition, the foreground may be in harmony or in conflict with the background.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

I try to cope with everything through humor.

It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires great strength to decide on what to do.

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

Probably I'll not be so successful if I will keep everything in myself inside of me.

That most people will not accept the fact that you are - and who was it that said that eventually Donald Trump is going to go on television and insists he never ran for president?

Private sector development and the creation of small businesses spur investment, jobs, opportunity, and hope. It empowers the market to meet local needs, whether for food, basic goods, or services.

I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever.

The Yellowstone river is a beautiful river to navigate.

If ten men are carrying a log - nine of them on the little end and one at the heavy end - and you want to help, which end will you lift on?