The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.

Always be a beginner at something, and always be in love with what you are beginning.

Immigration without assimilation is an invasion.

We, as conservative intellectuals, should not be in the business of making excuses for bad parliamentary decisions by Republican leaders in Congress.

I like things that are difficult, physically and mentally. Things that are really challenging, things that really maybe take a long time but really push me to my limits.

I'd rather see folks doubt what's true than accept what isn't.

But when I was seven or eight, I did my first little piece of acting.

For me, how I feel about what I wrote down turns into a song.

A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.

I have a really hard time stepping out of a limousine and confronting a sh*tload of photographers who are all screaming at you, because it's like saying, 'yeah, yeah, here I am!'

Bach was a top harmonist geezer, which is why the jazz cats love him.