When Larry Wright won the Pulitzer for The Looming Tower we all strutted around for weeks, until some sourpuss among us noted that it was actually Larry, and not the rest of us, who won the prize.

It took me ten years to write The Night Journal, so that was a big ordeal.

I love Austin. It's great here. I don't mind the heat.

I grew up thirty miles down the highway in San Marcos, and I've still got family there, so I guess I'm pretty well rooted.

I love the writers in Austin. We stick together. We all like each other and go to each other's book signings in case no one else shows up.

I'd be a dope to compare my writing with Wallace Stegner's, but that book probably influenced me in ways I didn't even realize while I was writing The Night Journal.

I got hooked on TV westerns back in the early sixties when I was about five, mostly because my brother was addicted to them and wouldn't let me watch anything else.

It seems like the Western genre has crept out of its casings during the last few years, and expanded to include books and movies we wouldn't originally have thought of as westerns.

The defining aspects of westerns are still pretty much in place - namely landscape and conflict. In other books the conflict can be internal, but in westerns it usually plays out on a big stage.

I think when you're a writer most of what you read influences you. The rhythms get into your head.

In middle school I wrote a paper on Hemingway and none of the sentences had more than five words.

Kids chase the love that eludes them.

The only way to get what you're worth is to stand out, to exert emotional labor, to be seen as indispensable, and to produce interactions that organizations and people care deeply about.

What if Theater was the Pong of the the digital Ping?A place where the live experience has an function?

We must act now to save Americans from the imploding Obamacare disaster.

Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?

We don't destroy our heroes today when we worshipped them yesterday.

Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.

you grab at any sign of hope. You grab it with both hands and breathe life into it, day after day. You do anything to keep it alive.

It's Axelle's [ Carolyn] concept and she's the one who got the ball rolling. She told a few of us about it, and I brought in Epic Pictures and got it financed.

Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.