For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.