It's peculiar what you remember when you're not trying.

I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns. It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything.

I think one of the many interesting things about [Donald] Trump is that people in the media did not take him seriously for months. Then, when it was clear he was going to be the nominee, they immediately hit the panic button. I think they overlook the possibility that he could just be a really bad president in the way that presidents are traditionally bad.

The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad.

We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.

When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day.

We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.