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.

From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.

You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart.

Thoughts, and words that spring from them, bend the individual's reality. To speak of death is to invite it. To think of sorrow is to produce it.

Being Indian is not blood as much as it is culture.

I always have one or two, sometimes more, Navajo or other tribes' cultural elements in mind when I start a plot. In Thief of Time, I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead, respect for burial sites.