We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.

The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.

Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.

We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.

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

Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.