We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.

If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

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.