Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.

A boy becomes a man when a man is needed

In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.

I'm back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.

A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down the river.