It would be hard to define chaos better than as a world where children decide they don't want to live.

Men often compete with one another until the day they die. Comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor.

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?

There are two kinds of writers: hustlers and sanctimonious hustlers.

Black bears, though, are not fearsome. I encountered one on the road to my house in Vermont, alone at night. I picked up two stones just in case, but I wasn't afraid of him. I felt a hunter's exhilaration and a brotherly feeling.

No birdcall is the musical equal of a clarinet blown with panache.