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 writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first.

Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.

There are good men everywhere. I only wish they had louder voices.

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

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.

Caution always, but when a man acts he should act suddenly and with decision.