You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart.

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.

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

It's not enough, and so limiting, to teach the simplistic value of a designer's material wear. Give children the gift of values that will last far beyond [a] fad's temporal popularity.

We are actually more afraid of change than we are of death

It's a lot of work to keep reinventing yourself and coming up with new stuff, but that's what it takes to be in show business.

Is your relationship strong enough to survive a trip to Ikea? Is their furniture strong enough to survive a relationship? Have you ever bought a bed there?

Spouses in healthy relationships cherish each other's space and are champions of each other's causes.

I don't know what "normal" means, anyway.

Trust, Kiki said, Trust is peppermints.

I bought my son a bat for Christmas. On New Year's it flew away.

When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.

Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth.