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

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur.

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.

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.

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

History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.