You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.

An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.

'Be alive,' the land says, 'listen - this is your time, your world, your pleasure.'

There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

I have a feeling that art is something you do for yourself, and that any time you turn your decisions over to someone else you're postponing at best, your own development. The atmosphere of the workshop should be that of trying out one's own work and accepting the signals from others but not accepting the dictation of others because that is a violation of the spirit of art. Art can't be done by somebody else, it has got to be done by the artist.

A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.