What I really like to do is to sit quietly and write. All that other stuff is a problem. Publication to reception to negotiation to... everything, it's a problem. And I like to sit outside for long periods of time and just be in the tranquility of nature. That's what I like.

When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.

How the holy and the profane mix in the light of day and at the end of life is sometimes the most beautiful thing in this world and a compassionate entry into the next. After failure and defeat, a concentration upon certain beauties, though forever lost and unretrievable, can lift the wounded past roundedness and the dying past dying, protecting them with an image, still and bright, that will ride with them on their long ride, never to fade and never to retreat.

Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.

One is attracted to beauty. Beauty is the coordination of things, in such a way, that it is what attracts you. It's almost self-defining.

I follow my own nose. So I read things that are different. People will always say to me, "Have you read Robert S. Bosco's latest novel?" or "Have you read so and so's history of Peru, which is reviewed in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times and has a buzz about it?" I don't even know what you're talking about. I'm like from another planet. I'm a pygmy from the jungle.

The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.