Some places are only written about when something extreme happens: like a murder, or an explosion, or a war. Only then do the cameras come running, because conflict makes for a great story. Unfortunately this means that much of the works is only seen through the lens of conflict. And when these are the only stories we hear, the world seems like a pretty scary place.

Place is important to my writing; I believe that if a reader gets a clear picture of the place where a character is from, then they can understand what motivates the character, what limits him or her…

If people visit books as they do tourist sites, looking for the famous passages they have heard about, looking for the best-seller they were told about, just to be able to say "I was there," then we have missed the whole point of literature.

For the same reason I read the National Geographic, I like to see places I will never visit.

most of my tourism is done through books.

Libraries are fascinating places; sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of traveling to distant lands.

Places are often treated like persons.

Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

Great stories happen to those who can tell them

Wherever men have lived there is a story to be told, and it depends chiefly on the storyteller or historian whether that is interesting or not.

Place and history are central to the fiction I write, both in the broad, general sense and in detailed particulars. Rural North America, regional cultures in critical economic flux, the images of an ideal and seemingly attainable world the characters cherish in their long views despite the rigid and difficult circumstances of their place and time. Those things interest me and are what I write about. I watch for the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them.

I like places in which things have happened — even if they're sad things.

While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest.

Writing...helps us identify what makes the whole geography of our lives.