Push it. examine all things intensely and relentlessly.
I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I’m terrified that I’ll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.
The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch – with an electric hiss and cry – this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?
There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.
Adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb.
At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.
The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
I think that the dying pray at the last not please but thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks.
I think the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door.
If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the world existed.
On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.
I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there’s some nice imagery in there. I don’t think of what to do with it.
The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I’m painting suddenly I’ll see something that I didn’t see before.
People who take photographs during their whole vacation won’t remember their vacation. They’ll only remember what photographs they took.
Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you’ve destroyed it.