After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.

I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.

We Americans are trained to think big, talk big, act big, love big, admire bigness but then the essential mystery is in the small.

Fishing tournaments seem a little like playing tennis with living balls.

I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.

Zen is the vehicle of reality.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.