My problem is not that there are too few ideas out there. It's that there are too many.

A great review is great. A bad review is the worst.

As a surfer, I think of places like a wave: you see one thing on the surface. But you always know there's something different going on underneath.

I get started at 5:30 in the morning and write till 10 A.M. Then I hike six or seven miles before going back to work.

I have to remind the people who put down East Coast surfing that Kelly Slater is from Florida.

I start work at 5 in the morning and I have a wicked insomnia problem.

I was a safari guide in the 1980s in Kenya.

I would prefer things to be peaceful and not have conflict.

Producing words isn't a problem for me. And I usually write two books at a time. When one horse gets winded, you jump on the other.

So I thought I should write five pages a day. And that's what I did. Eventually I had a book.

The bridge to Coronado Island off San Diego was built because the mob had a hotel there and needed a way to get people out there.

The novelist is the vestigial bone on the body cinema. We're like the little toe that can be cut off.

There are various kinds of savagery: emotional, spiritual, economic, and cultural savagery.

We always think of borders as something that separates two peoples but of course they unite them. It's something you have in common, literally.

Well, if you're writing a thriller, you have to have your character in mortal jeopardy on page 1 or it's not a thriller.

You know, I mean this sincerely, you know, I'm so grateful that I get to get up in the morning and do this, you know, and write books.

I was trying in 'The Power of the Dog' to write a brutally accurate in-your-face, if you will, description of 30 years in the war on drugs. And the effect that that had on people.

I've been around the surf culture since I was a kid. I grew up in a beach town in Rhode Island. Then eventually I lived in Dana Point, Calif., a real surf hotbed.

In the first place, it's surreal to watch filming, to see the little ideas you had in your head and now Taylor Kitsch is doing it, or Salma Hayek. And then to see it loud and bright onscreen is a trip.