There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments – moments of sustained creation – when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.
Writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound.
It is deeply satisfying to win a prize in front of a lot of people.
A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can’t get it by breeding for it, and you can’t buy it with money. It just happens along.
Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
I don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.
There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.
When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.
Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.
You’re terrific as far as I am concerned.
The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.
As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.
Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.
Old age is a special problem for me because I’ve never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself – a lad of about 19.
Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the savoring must come first.
The whole problem is to establish communication with ones self.
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow. Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.