History is merely a list of surprises... It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow.

But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.

You develop a style from writing a lot.