It is a kind of church, back in these last cores. It may not be your church -- this last one percent of the West – but it is mine, and I am asking unashamedly to be allowed to continue worshipping the miracle of the planet, and the worship of a natural system not yet touched, never touched by the machines of man. A place with the residue of God – the scent, feel, sight, taste, and sound of God – forever fresh upon it

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

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 If you are unpublished, enjoy the act of writing—and if you are published, keep enjoying the act of writing.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?

Nature, and the original system that created us, must always remain somehow with us, the bedrock of our movements and actions. What is our duty? To live a life.

I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.

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.

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.