I’m not writing a book of Western history,' I tell him. 'I’ve written enough history books to know this isn’t one. I’m writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank spac...
Literature is a function of temperament, and thank God there are many kinds of temperament and therefore many kinds of literature. I can speak only for my own, and after considerable acquaintance I ha...
One thing I have learned hard, if indeed I have learned it now: it is a reduction of our humanity to hide from pain, our own or others'. To hide from anything. That was Marian's text. Be open, be avai...
Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth...
The clear lesson of New England’s history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so.
The deep ecologists warn us not to be anthropocentric, but I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own human eyes. I know that is wasn't created especially for my use, a...
There are several dubious assumptions about the early West. One is that it was the home of intractable self-reliance amounting to anarchy, whereas in fact large parts of it were owned by Eastern and f...
There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours.
There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.
When she tipped her head and looked upward at the glowing dark blue dome pricked with its millions of lights, bigger and brighter than stars had ever been, she felt the mountains breathe in her face t...
When you marry into a Mormon family you marry tribes and nations.
Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
I am terribly glad to be alive and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American with all the rights and privileges that those words connote. And most of all I a...
A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people.
Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. And inevitability takes careful pin-setting.
For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.
Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line. You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those moments when the line moves you one step closer to the window.
How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferabl...
If you wanted something, you planned for it, worked for it, and made it happen.
In that latitude the midsummer days were long, midsummer nights only a short darkness between the long twilight that postponed the stars and the green dawn clarity that sponged them up.
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