If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

What white man can say I never stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet they say that I am a thief.

That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief we want to know how much money he stole and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom but what he did with it.

He who receives money in trust to administer for the benefit of its owner and uses it either for his own interest or against the wishes of its rightful owner is a thief.

Want of money and the distress of a thief can never be alleged as the cause of his thieving for many honest people endure greater hardships with fortitude. We must therefore seek the cause elsewhere than in want of money for that is the miser's passion not the thief s.

Therefore don't let sinners take courage to think they will be favoured like the thief on the cross for we see on the other side they may be like the hardened one and reproach death itself.

I always have one or two sometimes more Navajo or other tribes' cultural elements in mind when I start a plot. In Thief of Time I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead respect for burial sites.