“No work is so important you have to do it.”

“My feeling about work is that it's an unnecessary evil, so I've always done my best to avoid it.”

“To avoid starvation is the only excuse for working.”

“If your work is stressful, it's not your work.”

“The spiritual life to me has always meant just one thing: feeling.”

“I don't want to be the one who says life is beautiful. I want to be the one who feels it.”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”