That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there's nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.

Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

Gettysburg. . . . You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.