We need wilderness preserved-as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds-because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.

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

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

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.

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

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.