The Odyssey' is a great poem to refugee-dom... Odysseus is not entirely a refugee... he's somebody who's blown off course. The entire book is an exploration of that theme... I reread it every year... That's not as surprising as it sounds, because it's a rip-roaring book.

The Gobi is in many ways like the old American West, filled with abandoned hamlets and buildings, traces of disappeared peoples. Across its oceanic blond grass, horses and the black silhouettes of camels move languidly, as if they are the only inhabitants. Ancient Turkic nomads left enigmatic petroglyphs carved into boulders 2,000 years ago.

To me, the contemporary novel suffers from a lack of sense of place - or spirit of place, if you will. It's not important to most writers, I must assume, or they try to research a given background on sabbatical. Not for me. I write about places I've lived long before I ever set pen to paper.

I think humans are migratory animals.

When I moved back home, I took the initiative to involve my entire family in my career because I didn't find that anyone else was as passionate and thorough.

There have been a lot of murders and suicides in my family; it's like the primary cause of death. I wonder if there's a certain energy that attracts that.

You know this old style of American family series? Well, I sit there and cry.

Both my parents are Scottish, and although I grew up in Canada after moving over, all of my family are proud to be Scots.