You can't be unhappy in the middle of a big, beautiful river.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.

I don't see gender as the most significant fact of human existence.

We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.

Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.

The big curse of America, to me, is skinless, boneless chicken breasts. They're banal and relatively flavorless. The rest of the world's trying to get some fat to eat, and we're trying to ban it from our diet.

Either you can do what others want, or you can do what you want to do. That's an easy call.

We are delightfully trapped by our memories. I can't drink a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape Vieux Telegraphe without revisiting a hotel bistro in Luzerne, Switzerland, where I ate a large bowl of a peppery Basque baby goat stew. A sip and a bite. A bite and sip. Goose bumps come with the divine conjunction of food and wine.

There's something frightening about finding a woman who would take your heart.

After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.

My biggest pet peeve is when you go to a fine restaurant, and it's like a mausoleum inside. Good food should be joyful. There should be laughter and chatter, not people sitting there like they're in a funeral-parlor waiting room.

I do mourn my characters. I wrote an essay once where I was sure that far back in a marsh there was a hummock - a little hill of hardwoods - and an old farm house, where all the heroines in my novels lived together with all my beloved dead dogs. I've discussed this with my therapist, naturally. He says it's okay in fair amounts.

As a child, I was an obsessive reader, as was everybody in my family all winter long with my father. I think I was only 8 when I read Edward Gibbon's 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'

I've got a poem that's in a lot of international anthologies called 'After the Anonymous Swedish' and I thought, 'Well, I'm a Swede. I can make up a Swedish poem.' It turned out pretty good.

You can be in terrible shape, and if you take a three-hour walk through the forest and along the river, you're simply not the same as when you started out.

Sometimes, I tell my wife I have to take a car trip and collect new memories - I like to drive around at absolute random for weeks on end through the United States and parts of Canada. Or else I feel trapped, like you feel when your life is completely planned for months in advance, and you think you're not getting enough oxygen.

I like grit. I like love and death. I'm tired of irony.

I wrote 'Legends of the Fall' in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.

You do manage a somewhat religious attitude toward your art. It is a calling rather than a job.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

I work every morning, all morning, sometimes in the afternoons. Then sometimes I hunt in the afternoons - quail, doves, grouse up north - but just to stay alive, because writers die from their lifestyle but also from their lack of movement.

I'm actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it's the place I know best.

Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot... I've seen all these marriages that failed. Those people are always hollering at each other. That doesn't work.

Success and money can really be quite blinding.

I became aesthetically obsessed with language. And 'literary artist' - poet and novelist - is a calling. You are called to it the way preachers are called to preaching the gospel.

I do have trouble with titles.

Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.

So when I made some money, I didn't have any idea how one handled such a situation because no one in our family ever had any money.

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.