During the daylight hours he travels, without wanting to, the inside passage of his own self, a human labyrinth of memory, history, and the people th… - Linda Hogan

I think that in some ways maybe we've come to think of fiction as a lie. It's like the word “myth,” which means “lie” for many people; yet, myth is the highest form of truth. It is about the inner journey, about others before us who have gone that way and civilizations. It is about our life's task of becoming. In some ways I think fiction is like myth, but also fiction takes a fact or an event, even an imagined one, and it makes truth out of it. Prose is a process of uncovering, of getting to the bare, unstated facts of living. Maybe they are inner facts, maybe they are not historical, but they tell the highest truths.

There are such cruel tricks I have wondered about in nature, the way a whale must surface to breathe in the presence of its waiting killers, the way the white tails of deer and rabbit are so easily seen as they run from danger. There is something, too, in some human beings that wants to die, that drives us to our own destruction. There is something that makes us pretend to be less than we are, less than the other creatures with their grace and dignity. Perhaps it is this that makes us bow down to an angry god when we might better have knelt at the altar of our own love. (p344)

It's not my purpose to please all people. It's my purpose to write the most honest feeling work I can, work with integrity and respect for life.