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

in general, I feel most comfortable between known quantities.

One thing I'm always thinking about myself is what am I willing to make up? And the answer is not much.

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.

Life gives us what we need when we need it; receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing.

People are supposed to accumulate, I thought, as they get older, but I seem to be sloughing off, like a person wrapped in a hundred layers of cellophane, tearing one layer off at a time, trying to get down to me.

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.