Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place.

Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly.

A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

Words at night were feral things.

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

One writes to find words' meanings.

There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance.

They'll die in overtime

When it becomes a revolutionary act to eat real food, we are in trouble.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

I've managed to keep my clothes on for everything I've done so far.

The Venus transit is not a spectacle the way a total solar eclipse is a spectacle.

All is as beautiful as we think it.

If you want customers to hear about you, make something worth talking about.

Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.

Brilliantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly. This is the way to burn

What I have learned over the years is to try to stay in the moment. I want to feel it all because I've realized nothing lasts.