My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.

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 never seemed to learn from joy

Quakers almost as good as colored. They call themselves friends and you can trust them every time.

... there are a lot of shredders in country music - Redd Volkaert, Brent Mason, Dan Huff .. and guys like that

The law of England is a very strange one; it cannot compel anyone to tell the truth. . . . But what the law can do is to give you seven years for not telling the truth.

It should not be an act of social disobedience to light a cigarette. Unless you're actually a doctor working at an incubator.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

It's hard to not like a man who not only notices the colors, but speaks them

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

I've never been insulted by hateful satanists for not believing in their devil. Only by loving Christians for not believing in their God.

That's the trouble with a politician's life-somebody is always interrupting it with an election.