What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative

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.

My best trip is yet to come.

I was a sports kid.

That's at the root of the human interaction: fair trade.

One of the things you do in a band is the more you stay together, the more you play to your strengths.

Praying for freedom never did me any good til I started praying with my feet.

I will never say the things that I want to say to you. I know the damage it would do. I love you more than I hate my loneliness and pain.

For one man who thanks God that he is not as other men there are a thousand to offer thanks that they are as other men, sufficiently as others are to escape attention.

Fusion is the future. The mixing of ideas. The two lunch tables working together. Humanity...we're 1 people.

Simultaneously the Left Opposition in the course of several years carried on a struggle against the Stalinists in favor of collectivization.

I know people are going to be suspicious about everyone now. I know I don't have anything to hide. I've never done anything. It's just a shame it's gotten to this point.