That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues.

There were creative-writin g teachers long before there were creative-writin g courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors.

They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. Look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn't possibly have produced such machines.

In the middle of Siberia I guess there's a lake that big [ like the Great Lakes], but there are practically no other lakes that big with fresh water.

It's only recently that I've come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.

People stopped calling themselves Freethinkers because it was so specifically German and anything German was terribly unpopular because of the two world wars. My family became Unitarians instead - it's the same sort of thing.

Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.