I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.

We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.

Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. And we pay them for it.

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring

My Aunt Ida at age eighty-three: 'Yeah,' she said, 'I'll be dead pretty soon. And frankly, I don't give a damn.'

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.