Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it's what you believe, and the heck with everybody.

The military was all about hierarchies, who urinated highest on the hydrant

One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.

This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

There's an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I'm not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go.

A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn't care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you.