What a man wants to do he generally can do, if he wants to badly enough.

This-this was what made life: a moment of quiet, the water falling in the fountain, the girl's voice. . . a moment of captured beauty. Those who are truly wise will never permit such moments to escape.

Man needs so little... yet he begins wanting so much.

Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.

A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.

Luck comes to a man who puts himself in the way of it. You went where something might be found and you found something, simple as that.

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.