We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.