Gardening is full of mistakes, almost all of them pleasant and some of them actually instructive.

All anybody needs to know about prizes is that Mozart never won one.

Almost any garden, if you see it at just the right moment, can be confused with paradise.

Your garden will reveal yourself.

There is nothing like the first hot days of spring when the gardener stops wondering if it's too soon to plant the dahlias and starts wondering if it's too late.

Compared to gardeners, I think it is generally agreed that others understand very little about anything of consequence.

Turn down the noise. Reduce the speed. Be like the somnolent bears, or those other animals that slow down and almost die in the cold season. Let it be the way it is. The magic is there in its power.

A garden is not a picture, but a language.

Nature does not hesitate to interfere with me. So I do not hesitate to tamper with it.

All who see it say, "Well, you have favorable conditions here. Everything grows for you." Everything grows for everybody. Everything dies for everybody, too.

Wherever humans garden magnificently, there are magnificent heartbreaks.

Life ahead holds much more opportunities.

The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing.

As a culture, we are not comfortable with mortality. We do not accept it the way other cultures do. We cling to youth, and we don't want to die. It's like, 'Well, too bad, we do.'

Science grows and Beauty dwindles.

Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that who cares?... He's a mile away and you've got his shoes!

There are a number of people without whom I could not have written this book, but I hope you don't hold that against them. They are all fine people, and they had no idea how it would turn out.

Some people have got a mental horizon of radius zero and call it their point of view.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit. It is never a narrowing of the mind or a restriction of the human spirit or the country's spirit.

If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.