Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable.

When comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.