I sat staring up at a shelf in my workroom from which thirty-one books identically dressed in neat dark green leather stared back at me with a sort of cold hostility like children who resent their parents. Don't stare at us like that! they said. Don't blame us if we didn't turn out to be the perfection you expected. We didn't ask to be brought into the world.

Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.

Any piece of furniture, I don't care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated by servants, and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character ... A good deal like human beings.

celebratin' New Year's Eve is like eatin' oranges. You got to let go your dignity t' really enjoy 'em.

Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.

If it's freedom you want, come to Texas. No one there tells you what to do and how you have to do it.

Funny, isn't it, how your whole life goes by while you think you're only planning the way you're going to live it?