A man shares his days with hunger, thirst, and cold, with the good times and the bad, and the first part of being a man is to understand that.

It is better to have no emotion when it is work. Do what needs to be done, and do it coolly.

violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble.

The one law that does not change is that everything changes, and the hardship I was bearing today was only a breath away from the pleasures I would have tomorrow, and those pleasures would be all the richer because of the memories of this I was enduring.

Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party.

... we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.

If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.