Do you know what I think Mayflowers are, Marilla? I think they must be the souls of the flowers that died last summer, and this is their heaven.

It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.

Look at that sea, girls--all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.

Because when you are imagining, you might as well imagine something worth while.

Next to trying and winning, the best thing is trying and failing.

My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.

I don't know, I don't want to talk as much. (...) It's nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one's heart, like treasures. I don't like to have them laughed at or wondered over.

It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable.

Life is worth living as long as there's a laugh in it.

The world looks like something God had just imaged for his own pleasure, doesn't it?

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?

The abundance of small things, it'll bury you.

Unhappy is the fate of one who tries to win his battles and succeed in his attacks without cultivating the spirit of enterprise

I did radio, I did television, I did opera, I did films in which I had very, very little to say. But I had a lot of experience in front of the camera, and that's what really counts.

My teaching forces me to articulate what I think works in a piece of fiction and how I think it works. All of that gives me energy as a writer.

I'm not really keen on men wearing perfumes. It's just a bit wrong! I don't find it sexy. I prefer essential oils - patchouli is nice.

My views on everything from welfare to a balanced budget to affirmative action can be traced to what Buddy and Helen Watts taught me as a young boy growing up poor but proud in Eufaula.

By crying on my bed, drinking quite a lot and feeling tempted by drugs. Well, just not reading it to be perfectly honest with you. I know it's a bit of a copout.

When we went on the air, I didn't want to be interrupted for an act-one curtain.

There are only three white blues singers -- Geoff Muldaur is at least two of them.

Life is a canvas of many strokes where shades from different palettes meet into a picture so concrete that some forget it is their own, so become framed themselves.