These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.

Write as if you are dying.

You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of - of all things - an "idea for a story," and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard.

You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.

If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.