In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.

How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.