We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.

You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.

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

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

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