There's a view of Montana writing that seems stage-managed by the Chamber of Commerce - it's all about writers like A. B. Guthrie and Ivan Doig. It used to bother me that nobody had a scene where somebody was delivering a pizza.

Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana.

I had a passionate zest for Key West life in all of its little details. I'm not sure why or where that came from, but I was so excited to be there.

If I get too old to write, or short-term memory loss - that was the one Philip Roth was worried about - if I got to that point, that would be terrible, because everything about my life has been streaming toward writing and having something to say. That would make me feel as though I were in an iron maiden of some kind.

I think when I first started out, I had a kind of an exuberance about language, comedy, narrative leaps that... stopped just short of non sequiturs. And I'm much more cautious now.

For the last 15 years, we've worked with the Chamber of Commerce. We're not doing anything different than in the past; we've just formalized it.