No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.

A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.

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.

Largeness is a lifelong matter - sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are. You grow because you are not content not to.

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.

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

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.