In this room hung with the trophies of culture, her story sounded melodramatic and rough. She felt like a squaw explaining how you tanned a deerskin by working brains into the bloody hide and then che...
If you wanted something, you planned for it, worked for it, and made it happen.
If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature...
And though creative writing as an intellectual exercise may be pursued with profit by anyone, writing as a profession is not a job for amateurs, dilettantes, part-time thinkers, 25-watt feelers, the l...
And so this is the long road the nation traveled to get to Earthday, 1970, and beyond. Those who lead us down it… did not leave us a bad legacy considering the mood in which the continent was settled,...
The clear lesson of New England’s history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so.
I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don't want it ended
Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie.
Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line. You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those moments when the line moves you one step closer to the window.
Do what you like to do. It’ll probably turn out to be what you do best.
Be bold, he says. Be brave. Be true to your birthright, what you recognize in your heart.
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
And so give your uncommon readers a chance to join you in the solidarity of pain and love and the vision of human possibility. But isn’t it enough? For lack of the full heart’s desire, won’t it serve?
When she tipped her head and looked upward at the glowing dark blue dome pricked with its millions of lights, bigger and brighter than stars had ever been, she felt the mountains breathe in her face t...
Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth...
Literature is a function of temperament, and thank God there are many kinds of temperament and therefore many kinds of literature. I can speak only for my own, and after considerable acquaintance I ha...
Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals? We're all decent godless people, Hallie. Let's not be too hard on each other if we don't set the world afire. There's already been enough of that.
For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.
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 connote. And most of all I a...
The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth.those I don't have but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on.