I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.

An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?

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

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

Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.

The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.

I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.