You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.
You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones – maybe only the stones – understood.
The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
Caring passionately about something isn’t against nature, and it isn’t against human nature. It’s what we’re here to do.
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensibl e earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.
One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.
I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.