I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

People with victim mentality get accustomed to life with an assistance of someone’s mind, waiting for someone to make decisions for him

What's the best way to make sure that the poor have a share in a country's growing wealth: Regulation? Taxes? Philanthropy?

What if you wake up some day, and you're 65... and you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life?

In my opinion, what changed the situation eventually - and, of course, it took a lot of time to change it, things like that don't change in a week or a fortnight - was the new educational system.

Also, chubby people can never truly pull off ethereal the same way skinny people can never be jolly.

If he had a mind, there was something on it.

As long as you try your best, that is all that matters. You don't have to be the fastest runner or top of the class.

A lot of people consider my books to be straightforward, but I think that I write from atmosphere to atmosphere rather than from event to event.

Management by results is confusing special causes with common causes.

Let us all take more responsibility not only for ourselves and our families but for our communities and our country.