It is born to every Western girl to like outdoor life and to do all kinds of wild, daring things.

Oh, if people only knew how this business has grown.

There is no acting in a serial. You simply race through the reels.

Why should I have my picture taken when I can get paid for it?

The thing you've got to watch for is going broke when you're old. Look at all the people that go down and out at the finish. The man who built my country place is blind now and penniless. That's terrible!

All the women in my family were superb cooks.

It's called 'Night Moves,' and it's my favorite 'Doc Ford' of all times. It's way too complicated, but it worked.

My aunts still try to fatten me up.

The tough thing about writing is you go into a room alone, you close the door and you do your work.

It is a fact that scientists have deposited dye in certain lakes around Orlando and tracked the effluent to Florida Bay. There is a lake near Everglades City, Deep Lake, and large tarpon show up in that lake, 30 miles from the sea.

Not long ago I made a list of Doc Ford books I would like to do, and I came up with 11 pretty easily. I like to let the characters go their own ways and see what happens. I find them fascinating.

The Florida peninsula is, in fact, an emerging plateau, honeycombed with voids and vents, caves and underground waterways. Travelers on Interstate Highway I-75 have no idea that, beneath them, are cave labyrinths still being mapped by speleologists - 'cavers,' they prefer to be called.

The water is alive. It is alive. If we could get a mask and fins and drop down off these docks, we'd see snook and redfish and probably goliath grouper. And it's an amazing world unto itself and a very thin demarcation between one world and the other. You know, the distance of the water surface.

The written word is the only anchor we have in life. How extraordinary would it be if we had even three or four paragraphs written honestly about their lives by our ancestors?