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

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.

The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.

How much wilderness do the wilderness-lovers want? ask those who would mine and dig and cut and dam in such sanctuary spots as these. The answer is easy: Enough so that there will be in the years ahead a little relief, a little quiet, a little relaxation, for any of our increasing millions who need and want it.

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