While writing Cold Mountain, I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. He's much the same Jack who climbs the beanstalk, vulnerable and clever and opportunistic.

We mark some days as fair, some as foul, because we do not see that the character of every day as identical

People who are isolated interest me, whether they isolate themselves or have been isolated by circumstances.

She always carried a book, though, in case she needed to read a few pages to avoid unwanted conversation.

I've lived out West some... I've always liked the High Plains areas - eastern Colorado, eastern Wyoming, western Nebraska.

Or maybe it is only that we are so habitually inattentive that when some rare but simple geometry grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us into consciousness, we call our response sacred.

Verbs. All of them tiring.