I'm not very interested in telling the facts. I have a lot of investment in telling the truth.

I've always traveled. I'm a professor in a limited way. I teach one class two quarters out of four, so I get traveling done.

There's this great Ron Carlson story, "A Note on the Type," and it's about this guy who keeps escaping from prison. He's really good at escaping, but he gets caught all the time, because he can't stop writing his name on underpasses where he's running from the law. And there's this whole beautiful paragraph about how to run is to write. And, you know, it's obviously about the writer's life.

For me, the shaping of the story is more important than accuracy.

Give me a labyrinth to walk and I can usually free my mind.

There was something about the prairie for me—it wasn’t where I had come from, but when I moved there it just took me in and I knew I couldn’t ever stop living under that big sky.

I was in Mongolia, pretty extreme situations. We were sick with dysentery, we were sick with bronchitis. I had been bitten by a dog for the first time in my life and my whole hand was black, and there was no way to even think of getting a rabies shot without driving for five days, and then you wouldn't have wanted that needle in your skin anyway. And I had my period. Everything was wrong at one time. Like, I couldn't have been more uncomfortable. And I stayed up - it was too cold to sleep.