And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

It is what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over.

The dream of my life is to lie down by a slow river and stare at the light in the trees - to learn something by being nothing

I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second. And in America, we have it backwards.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.