The longest journey begins with a single step, not with a turn of the ignition key.

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.

It's true: Every time you kill an elk, you're saving some cow's life.

There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.

The author: an imaginary person who writes real books.