Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?"

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

You can't test courage cautiously.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subject inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

'Fecundity' is an ugly word for an ugly subject. It is ugly, at least, in the eggy animal world. I don't think it is for plants.

A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.

Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.

Eskimo: 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' Priest: 'No, not if you did not know.' Eskimo: 'Then why did you tell me?'

God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.

How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.

I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind.

I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.

I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.

If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.

Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.

Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.

Much has been written about the life of the mind.

Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.

The notion of the infinite variety of detail and the multiplicity of forms is a pleasing one; in complexity are the fringes of beauty, and in variety are generosity and exuberance.