Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning together from the vertical which produces the false arch.

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.

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

There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.