When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.

The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.

The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.

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.

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

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.