How do you caution a fawn about a cigarette a motorist has just flipped from his car window into a patch of yellow grass, or tell a sparrow that winged creatures eventually plummet to earth?

If there is any human tragedy, there is only one, and it occurs when we forget who we are and remain silent while a stranger takes up residence inside our skin.

Neither our own passing nor the passing of an era is a tragedy, no matter how much we would like to think it is.

When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily.

You have two choices in life. You either die or do something with your time. You're going to be doing something - why not write?

And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money.

You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home.