I was an only child. I’ve known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.
With any novel that you begin, you can’t foresee how difficult or easy it’s going to be, and you can’t really prepare yourself. You just have a take it one step at a time and know that it’s all right to keep going – you can always fix it.
If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.
I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise or chaos and satisfying busy pleasures.
Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn’t recognize itself as ignorance.
Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.
My great fear is not that I’ll run out of ideas. It’s that I’ll run out of time.
People with good intentions never give up!
Your sons weren’t made to like you. That’s what grandchildren are for.
I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.
If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.
In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.
Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market.
I learned why ‘out riding alone’ is an oxymoron: An equestrian is never alone, is always sensing the other being, the mysterious but also understandable living being that is the horse.
I readily admit it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species.
Is human nature basically good or evil? No economist can embark upon his profession without considering this question, and yet they all seem to. And they all seem to think human nature is basically good, or they wouldn’t be surprised by the effects of deregulation.
Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away ‘the suffocating four-person’ nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.