An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

Having grown up in Oklahoma when it was one of the last states which prohibited liquor, I grew up with War On Drugs, where every teenager knew who the bootleggers were.

Women are extremely important shapers of my own life.

Although I wasn't able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like.

I know what I write about seems exotic to a lot of people, but not for me. I pulled up to an old trading post and saw a few elderly Navajos sitting on a bench. I felt right at home.

Being Indian is not blood as much as it is culture.

You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart.

I always have one or two, sometimes more, Navajo or other tribes' cultural elements in mind when I start a plot. In Thief of Time, I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead, respect for burial sites.

How can you stop writing?

I try to make my books reflect humanity as I see it.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.

I am 82 years old. I imagine that I will keep on writing as long as anyone wants to keep reading.

Given a fair wind, we will negotiate our way into the Common Market, head held high, not crawling in. Negotiations? Yes. Unconditional acceptance of whatever terms are offered us? No.

God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.

The first thing you do when you get out to center field is put up your finger and check the wind chill factor.

So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and wind while just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.

A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.

I might have been born in a hovel but I am determined to travel with the wind and the stars.

His heart was like a sensitive plant, that opens for a moment in the sunshine, but curls up and shrinks into itself at the slightest touch of the finger, or the lightest breath of wind.

Sometimes songwriters and singers forget that. They get a melody in their head and the notes will take precedence, so that they wind up forcing a word onto a melody. It doesn't ring true.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

Throw caution to the wind and just do it.

I've always stuck with Gibsons. I've had Guilds and Fenders, too, but I always wind up going back to Gibsons.

Politicians trim and tack in their quest for power, but they do so in order to get the wind of votes in their sails.

The newer homes did not sustain as much damage because they were built to better safety codes; they were better designed, higher wind loads for the roof. All of those facets made those homes sustain the storm a whole lot better.

Now it would be as absurd to deny the existence of God, because we cannot see him, as it would be to deny the existence of the air or wind, because we cannot see it.

Life is the fire that burns and the sun that gives light. Life is the wind and the rain and the thunder in the sky. Life is matter and is earth, what is and what is not, and what beyond is in Eternity.

The general knowledge of time on the island depends, curiously enough, on the direction of the wind.

It'll work, if God, wind, leads, ice, snow, and all the hells of this damned frozen land are willing.

It becomes a giant's task to compute the result when the effect of cross seas, wind at all angles and ever varying force, arched surfaces, head resistance, ratio of weight to area, and the intelligence of the guiding power crop up.

Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid.

As time goes by, I realize that I do trust the wind. And I often write my songs for myself.

The biggest challenge has been simulating a tornado with wind machines and dirt and debris. Right when you walk on the set, you feel the energy of a tornado. But the hardest thing is trying to get dialogue out in all of that.

He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

That's a powerful lucky rabbit's foot. I got the part in Gone With the Wind because of it. I got my Warner contract, thanks to it.

We've got the wind at our back right now. Americans are waking up to the realities of their previous choices. We must keep America moving back to preeminence because our values and conservative ideas are the world's greatest hope.

I think daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.

Night fell clean and cold in Dublin, and wind moaned beyond my room as if a million pipes played the air.

Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm.

Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.

The ultimate would be to compete in a couple more Olympics, hopefully break some world records and wind up my sports career with a couple of years in the WNBA.

They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.