You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.

A side benefit of the new and developing technologies is that soon we won't have to feel guilty about the suffering and denigration of the animals because we will have made them up.

Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough

There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance.

Many writers today are wanderers. There is not only an unhousedness in language - how to convey, to say nothing of converge - but an unhousedness of place.