I made a boy’s mistake, common enough, of thinking that real life was knowing many things and many people, living dangerously in faraway places, crossing the sea, or starting a power company on the Columbia River, a steamship line in Bolivia.
It’s a defining difference, curiosity. I’ve never known a stupid person who was curious, or a curious person who was stupid.
I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life. I can’t even remain in the same room with coffee.
Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children’s future.
There’s something about rushing water that I can watch for hours and feel as if I need to do nothing more. It’s alive in a way that’s greater than any description of it...
Because there were all kinds of hell – some were black and dirty, and some were silvery and high.
To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.
I’ve imagined great victories, and I’ve imagined great races. The races are better.
As the clockwork of the millennia moved a notch in front of their eyes, it had taken their thoughts from small things and reminded them of how vulnerable they were to time.
Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever.
She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years.
Truth is no rounder than a horse’s eye.
He felt as if he were paying for the privilege of music with portions of his life and body. But it was well worth it.
I have seen lonely people of advancing age, yet as constant as angels, keeping faith to those they loved who fell in wars that current generations, not having known them, cannot even forget. The sight of them moving hesitantly among the tablets and crosses is enough to break your heart.
Writing is still my main career, but I would love, for instance, to serve in the New York State Assembly.
The best way to meet a woman is in an emergency situation – if you’re in a shipwreck, or you find yourself behind enemy lines, or in a flood.
Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor.
As it somehow always manages before the winter solstice, but never after, the early darkness was cheerful and promising, even for those who had nothing.
Whatever I do I’ve always done not because I want something but to compensate for a loss, to bring about a balance, to create amends, to make things right.
A good river is nature’s life work in song.