I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?