Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands?….

I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read..

Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly..

[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung dow….

Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe ….

if you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not..

I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers..

Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor, don't try to keep anything for yourself 'cause it'll ….

We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empt….

I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust le….

The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it mean….

I'd seen a great many partial eclipses, but a partial eclipse has the same relation to a total eclipse as flirting with a man does to marrying him. I….

We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the people, events, and things of the….

Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor..

Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa….

I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not..

I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam..

Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the mornin….

There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could….

The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thous….

Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are for….