“I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.”

To achieve style, begin by affecting none.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.

Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

Loneliness is a strange gift.

Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

The whole problem is to establish communication with ones self.

The city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.

Use the smallest word that does the job.

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

Is there anything in the universe more beautiful and protective than the simple complexity of a spider’s web?

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp – everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.

When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do.

No water, no life. No blue, no green.

It’s weird, but I don’t feel like think I deserve any of the attention. There’s really nothing but one audition for a Disney Channel movie that separates me from 2,000 other brown-haired, blue-eyed guys in L.A., you know?

The fragility, and even the degradation of our planet’s blue heart.

Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue – that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished.

I like all the kinds of music I’ve been into. I’m certainly not a purist in that I will only play country licks in a country song or blues licks in blues stuff.

Mother, she likes the blue material just fine.

If you watch the ‘Blue Collar Comedy Tour,’ don’t expect that when you come see me by myself, ’cause it’s a little rougher.