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

Women are extremely important shapers of my own life.

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.

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

How can you stop writing?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.