When I write, I don't like to be around any humans.

I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.

Food is a great literary theme. Food in eternity, food and sex, food and lust. Food is a part of the whole of life. Food is not separate.

If I can't be fishing or hunting, I want to be in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Your subconscious mind is trying to help you all the time. That's why I keep a journal - not for chatter but for mostly the images that flow into the mind or little ideas. I keep a running journal, and I have all of my life, so it's like your gold mine when you start writing.

The trajectory started when I was on the roof of our house looking out at a swamp when I was 19. I had written for several years, starting at about 15, but that day on the roof I took my vows and acknowledged my calling.

The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.

I won't talk or deal with a young writer unless I sense he has utterly given his life over to it. It's a waste of my time. If they don't feel 'called' - why in God's name would you do this?

There aren't any real dumb people in my voices. It's always irritated me about Hollywood dialogue - there's so much dialogue that would just bore a Ford mechanic. This is not how people talk.

I'm a time person. It's the one discipline I manage.

I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.

Given free rein, our imagination can get infinite.

If all I did was pretend I was Wilderness Jimmy, I would go stale. You know, I fish maybe 100 days of the year and bird-hunt, but if I didn't go to Paris once or twice a year, I'd be crazy.

I admit to occasionally sharing the financial hysteria of the rest of the country, the urgency to save more for the family in case you can't write any more.

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

I think the trouble with artists or chefs who whine about criticism is that if you love the good reviews, you have to at least read the bad ones.

I think about the sentence a long time, and then I write it. I don't revise it once it's set down.

Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

I used to have this illusion that time and remote areas prepare you for the world. Our moms used to think that kind of thing. Well, it doesn't prepare you for the world at all!

There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.

I'm not rational enough to be a good journalist.

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.

The only durable sense of success is if you've followed your calling.

New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York - in case you haven't noticed.

I don't feel tentative when I start to write. I've usually thought about a novel or novella for several years and created a lot of juice and density and energy by that time so by the time I get ready to go, I just let 'er fling, you know.

The idea is to eat well and not die from it - for the simple reason that that would be the end of your eating.

What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

I wasn't taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.

Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

You have to temporarily be the character in order to understand him. It's sort of what they used to call 'shape-shifting.'

We are all naturally xenophobic.

I'm outdoors a lot, so I get dark. Guess who gets stopped? I've been pulled over, and they ask, 'Where are you from?' I say, 'Montana.' They say, 'Are you sure? And I say, 'I'm reasonably sure I'm from Montana, but you know, this is a dream life.' You start on this shtick with them and it's fun.

Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

How is it macho that I like to hunt and fish? I've been doing it since I was four.

Nothing in the world causes more problems than concepts of ethnic virtue. It's irrelevant.

I'm afraid that eating in restaurants reflects one's experiences with movies, art galleries, novels, music - that is, characterized by mild amusement but with an overall feeling of stupidity and shame. Better to cook for yourself.

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

I don't know what psychotherapy does. I have been seeing the same person for 26 years now.

The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.

Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.

Yeah, but now suddenly - you know, universities are notoriously market oriented, too.

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.

Your kids inevitably want to move where they had their vacations when they were younger.

I can write anywhere.

Short things are short all over and long things are long all over.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.