The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.

About mistakes it's funny. You got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep people from making theirs they get mad.

A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.

I sometimes wonder ... if the land is not destroying the people who inhabit it as the people who inhabit it are destroying the land. A magic continent, a Peculiar Treasure, stuffed with riches, millions in it are starving in the midst of plenty.

... home isn't always the place where you were born and bred. Home is the place where your everyday clothes are, and where somebody or something needs you.

I never would just open a door and walk through, I had to bust it down for the hell of it. I just naturally liked doing things the hard way.

In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world.