We tend to take summer's vitality for granted, when in actuality it is just one prolonged drought, or disease, away from decimation.

Our society routinely steals from the future.

Fiction is true. It doesn’t have to factual to be true.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

It doesn't matter is you call it 'Obama-care' or 'Elvis Presley care' or 'I-don't-care care.' It cannot sustain itself in its present form.

Let's stay young forever. Young, stupid, and pretty. Sounds like a plan, don't you think?

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

Is not labour, like learning, its own reward?

I learnt how to hunt rattlesnakes with an eagle for Serena.

The genius of a folk melody or story is not the feeling that it's original but quite the opposite - the feeling that it has existed all along.

I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.

The easiest way for me to lose interests is to know too much of what I want to say before I begin.