We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men

people in general are totally unable to detach the personality of a writer from the products of his thinking.

Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.

Two elements enter into successful and happy gatherings at table. The food, whether simple or elaborate, must be carefully prepared; willingly prepared; imaginatively prepared. And the guests - friends, family or strangers - must be conscious of their welcome.

I had done battle with a great fear and the victory was mine.

Men had reached into the scrub and along its boundaries, had snatched what they could get and had gone away, uneasy in that vast indifferent peace; for a man was nothing, crawling ant-like among the myrtle bushes under the pines. Now they were gone, it was as though they had never been. The silence of the scrub was primordial. The wood-thrush crying across it might have been the first bird in the world-or the last.

I have found that each of my books has developed out of something I have written in a previous book. Some thought evidently unfinished.