The first Chapter Law is, "Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it."

I try to make my books reflect humanity as I see it.

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

Women are extremely important shapers of my own life.

A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.

Although I wasnt able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like.

How can you stop writing?