In a story, nothing is real until it is acted upon.

A man ... needs to get out in the open air and sweat and blow off the stink.

One of finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory... Powerful and profoundly moving.

It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the continuities of life are astonishingly complex, and cannot take place in islands of semiwilderness like the national parks.

We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in.

Writing is a funny business. You sit in your room and listen to voices and write everything down. What kind of a profession is that?

I had discovered a terrible vulnerability I myself which I think of not as cowardliness but as an ability to imagine too much.