Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.

The heart of it all is mystery, and science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery--a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels, back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man's knowledge.

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

Nothing will get you into trouble so deep or as sad as faith.

The natural world is the only one we have. To try to not see the natural world - to put on blinders and avoid seeing it - would for me seem like a form of madness. I'm also interested in the way landscape shapes individuals and populations, and from that, cultures.

Fiction is harder for me than nonfiction - more gratifying, as a result, when it succeeds.

Even the largest of my dreams and ambitions, I realize with increasing dismay, were puny, measly, compared to the object of my dreaming. I would not say my life to date has been built overmuch of compromise, but still, it surrounds me.