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

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

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

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

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

If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.