I don't make outlines or plans because whenever I do, they turn out to be useless. It is as if I am compelled to violate the scope of any outline or plan; it is as if the writing does not want me to know what is about to happen.

I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.

Writing cant change the world overnight, but writing may have an enormous effect over time, over the long haul.

Anybody can act violently - there is nothing to it; but not every person is able to destroy his enemy with words.

Things which don't shift and grow are dead things.

You don't have anything if you don't have the stories.

Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there is a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions, on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of "nonsense". But they had been wrong.