I'm like a big old hen. I can't cluck too long about the egg I've just laid because I've got 5 more inside me pushing to get out.

Neither drink [coffee or tea] was known in Frankish lands, but seated in the coffeehouses, I drank of each at various times, twirling my moustache and listening with attention to that headier draught, the wine of the intellect, that sweet and bitter juice distilled from the vine of thought and the tree of man's experience.

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.

In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame.

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do

One never realizes how much and how little he knows until he starts talking.

Up to a point a person’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and changes in the world about them. Then there comes a time when it lies within their grasp to shape the clay of their life into the sort of thing they wish it to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune or the quirks of fate. Everyone has the power to say, "This I am today. That I shall be tomorrow.