When you find the right people, you never let go. The people who count are the ones who are your friends in lean times. You have all the friends you want when things are going well.

THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation.

Every rejection is incremental payment on your dues that in some way will be translated back into your work.

I think the "crime novel" has replaced the sociological novel of the 1930s. I think the progenitor of that tradition is James M. Cain, who in my view is the most neglected writer in American literature.

But the participants [in war] never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value.

Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game. I don't know if you ever played competitive tennis, but you learn not to watch bad tennis; it messes up your game. Art's the same way.

I believe the causes that create them [serial killers] are theological in nature, rather than societal. I believe they make a conscious choice to erase God's thumbprint from their souls.