He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God.

I have a pretty good knowledge of the Indian world by virtue of living on several different reservations and being exposed to several different cultures and languages.

The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred.

Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, and dwell upon it.

My father was a painter and he taught art. He once said to me, 'I never knew an Indian child who could not draw.'

Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.