“Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.”

“Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”

“Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.”

“Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.”

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game and do it by watching first some high-school or small-town teams”

“What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required -- no personal, individual, induplicabl...”

“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...”