“When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I’m trying to do. I’m frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.”

The writer works on the inside and the critic works on the outside. I don’t know what it looks like on the outside, sometimes. It’s not that I’m not interested-it’s not where I live. I live inside the story.

My faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists, who’ve been doing this for a long time, trying to make us aware of what it is that we’re living in, I put my faith in those people.

The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.

There’s so much to be afraid of.

The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.

The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.

For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.

The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.

I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.

You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

It does not demean men to want to be what they imagine the wolf to be, but it does demean them to kill the animal for it.

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

You can’t learn anything from saguaro cactus, from ocotillo. They are just passing through; their roots, their much heralded dormancy in the dry season, these are only illusions of permanence. They know even less than you do.

We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.

I’ve never pursued a role. I always hear stories about actors going after parts and I’m, like, ‘How do they do that?’ It seems so weird. It seems like a total myth or something.

You can tell how good a filmmaker is if you can turn the sound down but you can still feel the story.

Stories aren’t the beauty of what did happen. They’re the beauty of what could happen.

When Hollywood sees a good story about a man who sells confidence, they see themselves and they like it.

Tell your story. That’s the secret of immortality. The one true way to live forever.

There’s fierce competition between all the networks to get the guest who can bring the most pertinent information about whatever the story of the moment happens to be.

Lawyers didn’t seriously get involved in the Watergate stories until quite late, when we realized we were on to something.

An unread book does nobody any good. Stories happen in the mind of a reader, not among symbols printed on a page.