Like everyone in his right mind, I feared Santa Claus.
Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.
Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.
Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?
Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.
What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals – then what wasn’t?
I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.
Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains.
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.
Admire the world for never ending on you – as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
God gave me a talent to draw. I ‘owed’ it to him to develop the talent.