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

The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.

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

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 fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.