Nothing prepares you for making art except making art. You have to do it to get better.

At 16, I dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a Trauma Centre before ultimately deciding to go to university.

The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.

No land was ever acquired honestly in the history of the earth.

My first published novel, American Rust, took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.

When you start to look at Native American history, you realize that, very far from being a peaceful, morally superior people, Native Americans were not that different from Europeans.

You ought to be able to grow up in a place and not have to get the hell out of it when you turn eighteen.