«She started out all excited and impressed. ... (She took an immediate dislike to Bill, who struck her as a narcissistic snake.)»

«because she was very upset and I was trying to do the gentlemanly thing.»

«They don't understand that in the West, there are many groups that have not yet made their peace with the rest of America. . . . People came to the West to be left alone, as the Mormons did. The West continues to be an experimental American culture.»

«A hundred and fifty years ago, this was just a continent. You could move to the borders and start a whole new country.»

«[Most writers' view of the New West is] either phony - obsessed with the same tired mythology - or it's obsessed with anti-mythology, ... There's not a lot of realistic, observant writing about the West right now.»

«'What should be, is.' As my grandmother explained it to our family the winter she lost three fingertips to frostbite when the furnace in her little house broke and she fell and cracked a hip while trying to light it, 'Accepting life's imperfections is not the secret. The secret, dears, is to understand life has none. How could it? We've got nothing to compare it to. We can dream something up, of course- some pretty maybe life where fingers are very hard and indestructible- but that's pure mischief, darlings. Fingers freeze. It's one of the things they like to do sometimes.'»

«I wasn't above having thoughts of God's wrath.»

«Literally, while I was writing, the town eccentrics were looking over my shoulder, asking about what I was writing, listening to my explanations, offering their two cents. It had gotten around town pretty quickly that what Walter was doing inside his house could be viewed easily on a computer. I thought, 'This is more interactivity than I can stand!' But it was interesting too.»