You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves.

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.

Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.

I was only kicking down the Christmas tree to get the star on top.

I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?

When a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.