The future is wider than vision, and has no end.

This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough.

Blame it on our short memories, the daily grind of the 24-hour-news cycle, or the endless barrage of information that comes at us on social media, but count me in the number of people who did not...

Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued.

In bad weather, I spent hours drawing action figures on paper, coloring them, backing them on cardboard, then cutting them out and creating whole stories around their lives.

Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.

My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.

There's an idea of the Plains as the middle of nowhere, something to be contemptuous of. But it's really a heroic place.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

I didn't even enter a bookshop until I was 14 because I couldn't afford books until I got my first Saturday job, but by the time I was six or seven, I spent practically every Saturday down my local...

Nightmares of a capital city overwhelmed by tsunami, war or plague transfix us, but catastrophe is first felt locally, and there are many homes outside the city.

Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.

I'm struggling with what is epic. People decided I was epic - if by epic, do you mean a big, heavy book? 'David Copperfield' is a big book - is it epic? Amount of time covered, length, drama, or story...

I wake up around seven, and I give my daughter breakfast. I spend the first hour or two of her day with her.

I've been delivering these little homilies since 1980 - that's 37 years - and altogether, NPR statisticians tell me, my bloviation total is 1,656 commentaries - and I trust you've hung onto every...

It is no accident that the place that lends itself to creating conflicts between the dominant order of thought and people who want to speak their minds freely is the college campus, where...

I think in some ways, you end up with more interesting storytelling with series, because if you've written yourself into a corner with something in book 1, you have to be cleverer to get out of it.

We are a naturally hierarchical species.

Looking back, I realize my favorite stories weren't in books, they were in comics. On top of being a history enthusiast, my father was also a comics fan, and he kept his stash in the top drawer of his...

Everyone believed the Senate could not really be led. It used to take so long to rise up through seniority. In two years Lyndon Johnson is assistant leader of his party. In four years he is the leader...

I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

To be an Instagram model, you absolutely cannot just post pictures of yourself in a bikini for the sake of people seeing you in a bikini - even if that is exactly what you are doing. No, you need to...

Earned a bachelor's at 27, then an M.F.A. that is still completely unused and in mint condition, never taken out of the box.

I intentionally abandoned the hard stuff early on because not only do I think it's useless, I think it's a distraction.

I married an American. He was from the Pacific Northwest but went to law school in the South, so I was living in Virginia and North Carolina.

What I miss is being close to nature - collecting your own water and generating your own electricity, catching your own food. I still dream of doing that with my own family, even if it's just for a...

In the simplest terms, a fast-growing company can't keep growing at the same fast rate forever. It eventually has to slow down.

For a book to function... it has to be a functioning reality. The character has to be real, and I imagine that's exactly what happens for a spy who is in deep cover.

The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if...