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

He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.

wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.