The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.

Love likes to extend itself. If you receive it in a book - or however you get it - then your duty is to extend it beyond.

Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise. Become a stranger to need of pity. Or if compassion be freely given out, take only enough. Stop short of the urge to plead, then purge away the need. Wish for nothing larger than your own small heart or greater than a star. Tame wild disappointment with caress, unmoved and cold. Make of it a parka for your soul. Discover the reason why so tiny human midget exists at all, so scared and so unwise. But expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.

Ignorance, arrogance, and racism have bloomed as Superior Knowledge in all too many universities.

My writing is very organic. It's what I am. My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig. So I think of it as something that's very essential to my being.

The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'

I feel very happy to be living in Berkeley because there are a lot of people who are politically active here.