I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.

A strange species we are, We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick. --John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson

Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.

His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.

We don't take a trip. A trip takes us.

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.