I am very interested in people trying to write because I don't have a big academic background at all.

Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.

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

Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now - solar, wind - for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only human work that cannot be done without oil is war.

Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.

When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems.