It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world-Nature-is the only means by which we can requite God’s obvious love for it.
You can’t belay a man who’s falling in love.
One of the pleasant things about small town life is that everyone, whether rich or poor, liked or disliked, has some kind of a role and place in the community. I never felt that living in a city – as I once did for a couple of years.
Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.
Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
Everyone should learn a manual trade: It’s never too late to become an honest person.
A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.
I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.
A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.
It’s all still there in heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure-they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days and years to come.
If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.
It is not an easy thing to inflate a dog.
Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they’d be intolerable.
Why the critics, like a flock of ducks, always move in perfect unison: Their authority with the public depends upon an appearance of unanimous agreement. One dissenting voice would shatter the whole fragile structure.
It is not the writer’s task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.
The Latino military fare badly when they stumble into war with the gringos. But in the torture, murder, and massacre of their own people, they have always performed with brilliance and elan.
The author: an imaginary person who writes real books.
I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others?
I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.
Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.