A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person.

Don't judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.

I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.

In many of my books, I explore the ways in which grandparents or other older persons are shaped by the young, and the young are shaped by the old, in an evolving dance.

Man needs bread and hyacinths: one to feed the body, and one to feed the soul.

I started thinking about life insurance and how nice it would be if you could get insurance that your life would be happy, and that everyone you knew could be happy, and they could all do what they really wanted to do, and they could all find the people they wanted to find.

I once fell 20 feet from a tree, was knocked unconscious, and when I picked myself up and straggled home, my parents thought I was making it up. However, when my brother and I fabricated a story about an encounter with a bear, they believed that! So maybe I learned very early on that fiction was more interesting to listeners!