When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

It is worthwhile for anyone to have behind him a few generations of honest, hard-working ancestry.

No amount of anxiety or worry is going to make any difference to anything that's going to happen anyway, so why let yourself feel so heavy?

When the sappy boughs Attire themselves with blooms, sweet rudiments Of future harvest.

It's thrilling. There's birth and death and frustration and victory in raising horses. It's like a little microcosm of life is built into the short lives of these creatures.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

The way you can recognize to what you are committed to is by your actual results. What you have gotten in life is a direct result (good or bad) to what you have been committed to.