When you sign on to be an activist in northwest Montana, people in the grocery store will avoid eye contact, particularly if they're hanging out with outspoken opponents to your views.

Write every day. Don't ever stop. If you are unpublished, enjoy the act of writing—and if you are published, keep enjoying the act of writing. Don't become self-satisfied, don't stop moving ahead, growing, making it new. The stakes are high. Why else would we write?

A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.

The future's so random, and so mobile, there's no way you're going to get to your vision of what you want your community to be just by chance alone. I really believe you have to let people know, to use your voice, to say, 'this is what I like about my place, I want to keep it this way, this is what I think can be improved, this is what I disapprove of.' That's the only way you can have a part in shaping the future.

Sometimes I perceive that there is a stillness and a wholeness in the world or in some portion or corner or fragment of the world or some little place in time where things just feel so right and huge and powerful and easy that I will have the perhaps blasphemous thought maybe there are layers of heaven.

My life, I realize suddenly, is July. Childhood is June, and old age is August, but here it is, July, and my life, this year, is July inside of July.

Live long enough and all weaknesses will be illuminated, but again perhaps that is not all bad for cannot they then begin to become strengths?