Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.

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.

Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.

No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.

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

Largeness is a lifelong matter. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, it's teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower; you're large because you can't stand to be small.

Water is the true wealth in a dry land.