That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.

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.

Camping is nature's way of promoting the motel business.

God has a specific plan for you

Nobody can learn for another. Only we can teach ourselves.

I never realized how much I loved life until I knew it was being taken away.

Our attitudes are the crayons that color our world.

We can certainly defuse the intensity of the anti-immigrant feeling if we can bring some reality to the discussion by showing that they are not using that many resources.

The free world knows, out of the bitter wisdom of experience, that vigilance and sacrifice are the price of liberty.

I remember seeing Eddie Murphy RAW and seeing people laughing and having a good time and that was the same response I was getting so I thought I was on to something.

My guilty pleasure is Simon & Garfunkel. I'm embarrassed about it. They're dorky.

My belief is firm in a law of compensation. The true rewards are ever in proportion to the labour and sacrifices made.