A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.

All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.

Intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over.

No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe

People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.

It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leporous.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. --speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962