The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.

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

if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not.

When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.

Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.