“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.”

If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.

real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.

The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.

The gaze of the wolf reached into our soul.

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.

I know of no restorative of heart, body, and soul more effective against hopelessness than the restoration of the Earth.

The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination. It takes your stare and turns it back on you

Throughout the centuries we have projected on to the wolf the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.

The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of the exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by the land as it is by genes.

Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.

It is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

People think that if you’ve written a book and somebody’s given you a pat on the back then, you know, it’s all – you’re all settled, you know? You’re going to be fine. I know that if I’m not confused, and really afraid, my work isn’t going to be any good.

My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we’re doing on this planet.

The most intelligent thing we can do is love, not reason.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.

Our relationships, relationships between adults, how all those pieces fit together – that’s the most complicated thing we all face.

I always listen, I ask children, I even ask adults in tennis, “What are your children playing?” And most of the time it’s not tennis. It’s pathetic.

When you’re a boy your life can be measured out as a series of uncomfortable conversations reluctantly initiated by adults in an effort to tell you things that you either already know or really don’t want to know.

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?

To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was this what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn’t like it, but it made it easier to go on.

Small children do not belong at an adult party, and especially should not be used like trained midgets to help serve martinis.

Can we not interpret our adult wisdom into the language of boyhood?

Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities?