You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood- and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a….

Teaching is the royal road to learning..

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly s….

A good time for laughing is when you can..

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults. They frolic with animals, caress them, share with them feelings neither has words for.….

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that t….

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures..

Each death and departure comes to us as a surprise, a sorrow never anticipated. Life is a long series of farewells; only the circumstances should sur….

I am always jumping into the sausage grinder and deciding, even before I’m half ground, that I don’t want to be a sausage after all..

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary..

Nothing is so dear as what you're about to leave..

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself..

A religious awakening which does not awaken the sleeper to love has roused him in vain..

One can write out of love or hate. Hate tells one a great deal about a person. Love makes one become the person. Love, contrary to legend, is not hal….

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungl….

A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever..

Somehow I have the feeling that in some book is the great treasure I've been looking for all my life..

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are fr….

A rattlesnake that doesn't bite teaches you nothing..

The conversation of two people remembering, if the memory is enjoyable to both, rocks on like music or lovemaking. There is a rhythm and a predictabi….

It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own..