If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

I think you have to be cool to be a good flirt, and I don't think I'm very cool.

I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.

When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.

Sometimes one appears to have more freedom than one actually possesses. It is easy to see what one wishes to see.

Self dedication is a spiritual experience.

The basic premise that children must learn about emotions is that all feelings are okay to have; however, only some reactions are okay.

The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.

In politics, familiarity doesn't breed contempt. It breeds votes.

I find that most books that I don't like are those in which the authors have indulged themselves. I can almost sense when they're writing something for themselves.