The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.

An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.

If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't?

The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

Write about winter in the summer.

Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.