Progress means nothing to presence.

The fish in the creek said nothing. Fish never do. Few people know what fish think about injustice, or anything else.

If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell you it again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.

It's probably simply a matter of temperament that I never stopped to wonder if I could "match" what I had done, never choked off my writing by competing with myself, or with anybody else for that matter. My ambition was absolutely centered on the work itself, never on what it would bring me, or "who" it would make me. I never cared about that at all.