“Don't be afraid of poetry.”

“Reading to small children is a specialty.”

“One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.”

“When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.”

“Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didnt know you knew.”

“When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.”

“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....”

“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...”