If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.

We write to make sense of it all.

You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.