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.

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.

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.

Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.

Some things can be fixed. Some things are just too broken.

For every woman who burned a bra, there's a man burning to wear one.

Perfection itself is not the ultimate goalbut the ultimate condition of life.

Thinking always deceives us when it becomes a substitute for action.

What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.

Quality, quality, quality: never waver from it, even when you don't see how you can afford to keep it up. When you compromise, you become a commodity and then you die

Writing in the incurable itch that possesses many.

Sexuality is half poison and half liberation. What’s the line? I don’t have a line.

Don't ever let anyone turn your sky into a ceiling.

Wasn't that the point to being married? That you had a partner, someone you trusted, to help with important decisions.