You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about.

You shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing It really doesn't make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you've done it.

When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again.

Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?

All still when summer is over stand shocks in the field, nothing left to whisper, not even good-bye, to the wind. After summer was over we knew winter would come: we knew silence would wait, tall, patient calm.

Language can do what it can’t say.

I heard a bird congratulating itself all day for being a jay. Nobody cared. But it was glad all over again, and said so, again.

Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.

What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.

It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation. . . . Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you--you come at it over unmarked snow.