Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.

National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.

We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.

Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.

Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.

She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.

Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.

Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.

It takes a near act of rebellion for even a four-year-old to break away from society's expectations.

Every adult grew from a kid who beat the odds. But at different times, in different places, the odds have been appallingly steep.

Disaster is a natural part of my evolution toward tragedy and dissolution.

If you had to hurt somebody or intimidate them or kill them, it would be morally justifiable.

Every thought sounds like a footfall, Till a thought like a boot kicks down the wall.

That choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet.

When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn't seem interesting to me.

The man who is prepared has his battle half fought.

Jealous?" "Maybe." "No reason. I like my ladies with a pulse.

It was beyond embarrassing or humiliating or even mortifying. It was ego-slaying!