When I select a topic, it's usually a commitment of two to three years of my life

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.

When I went to college, my goal was to be a college history teacher. I majored in history.

It's not about battling the original artists when I record these songs, it's about paying tribute to them.

I feel sorry for confetti. Its useful life lasts about two seconds. And it can never be used again.

You set your reality and carefully construct it so that it has a certain feeling, an energy. That's the vital, visceral thing about making an illustration.

Learning to never quit and keep going is the biggest thing. I don't think it was ever an epiphany, I think that's just the most important thing that has worked for me: to keep going and keep trying.

If we do not understand our sin, we will not understand the kind of savior we need.

Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also.

We exponents of horror do much better than those Method actors. We make the unbelievable believable. More often than not, they make the believable unbelievable.

There is nothing wrong with good schmaltz, nothing wrong with good heart... The critics think I'm kind of corny. Well, I am corny. As long as people respond to it, I'm okay.