Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.

North Korea has a very striking mythology there. It is influencing the whole nation.

In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.

I am torn between the beauty of the natural world, which you see all around us, and the idea that some dumb tornado could blow a telephone pole onto my sweet Camaro.

I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.

I don't see poetry as something that has to do with too much emotion anyway. It has to do with language.

The wonderful thing is that Clive [Oppenheimer ] insisted on training his camera - his private camera - on me at one point. We were discussing things such as how to avoid certain dangers, while reflecting on a volcano that had threatened to explode 40 years ago.