Justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

Your life is an opportunity to question, discover, and explore.

To possess a rich life of wholeness that brings happiness into the soul

If we never had any storms, we couldn't appreciate the sunshine.

Memories are their own descendents masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

You know, the energy I think I was just born with. I think I was just always like that as I kid; I was always real energetic.

War being the greatest of evils, all its accessories necessarily partake of the same character.

As they do every year, al-Qaida has threatened to disrupt and ruin Christmas. You know, we already have a group that disrupts and ruins Christmas every year. They're called relatives.

These days the temptation to use steroids in sports has become too great for many young athletes.

A satirist, often in danger himself, has the bravery of knowing that to withhold wit's conjecture is to endanger the species.

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hope soon to be swept away.