A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.

It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination... If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldnt believe the world existed.

He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

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

Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.

Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.