Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my...

What do you mean, ‘Angle of Repose?’ she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother’s life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down....

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh...

Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the books have never come up to what was in my head,...

Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness,...

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.

[Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for...

[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air … Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in...

Hard writing makes easy reading.

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t...

Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too....

The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don’t practice it.

It is not an unusual life curve for Westerners – to live i n and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space clarity & hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement...

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. … That is no gap between the generations, that is a...

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called “merely cultural,” not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at...

It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it’s persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live...

It’s idealistic, it’s for love and gentleness, it’s close to nature, it hurts nobody, it’s voluntary. I can’t see anything wrong with any of that.”Neither can I. The only trouble is, this commune will be...

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention…

Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a...

What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me...

There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.

[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no...

You can’t retire to weakness — you’ve got to learn to control strength.

Ruth tells me at least once a day that old people, or people getting old, tend to disengage, back away, turn inward, listen only to themselves, and get self-righteous and censorious. And they mustn’t. (I...

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am...

After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.

What if I can’t turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can...

Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth,..

wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.

..if you could forget mortality… You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making,...

Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others … an accidental brushing of shoulders...

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens...

Buenos dias,” she said in response to Hernandez’s soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye.

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they’re a...

I am terribly glad to be alive and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American with all the rights and privileges that those words...

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not towisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did...

There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and...

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. “It’s all right,” he said. “But I’d take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That’s about...

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don’t believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns...

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed … We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more...

Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.

The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

I wouldn’t live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn’t want it next door. I’m not too happy it’s within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me....