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In a novel, even if you put a country in the wrong hemisphere, which I've done, I can always claim it was part of the additional weirdness of the story.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it.

I think writers from both East and West have long been fascinated by the ancient tales and the opportunity to reinterpret them.

Traditional fiction has a little bit of spatial exploration but is basically a question of time - the question is, what happens next?

Most writers are drawn to what is unknown, rather than what is clear in any tale.

The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.