“All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking”

“Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.”

“The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particula...”

“Paradise Lost was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Th...”

“Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.”

“Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.”

“Action is the pulse of any good story, but the character is the heart. If the action has no consequence to the character, the story loses heart.”

“When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.”

“I believe one of the important differences between creating literature and just telling a story around the campfire is that in literature youre recreating the experience of life, not just relaying ...”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”