I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads.

In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

We write about what we don't know about what we know.

To be modest means that you have something to be modest about.

This hill crossed with broken pines and maples lumpy with the burial mounds of uprooted hemlocks (hurricane of '38) out of their rotting hearts generations rise trying once more to become the forest just beyond them tall enough to be called trees in their youth like aspen a bouquet of young beech is gathered they still wear last summer's leaves the lightest brown almost translucent how their stubbornness has decorated the winter woods.

I lived in a house in the East Bronx, a totally Jewish neighborhood on East 172nd Street. You didn't see Christians much, although one lived next door. We thought they were kind of a minority.