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

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.

Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

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.

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.

I have a really powerful urge to see things work.

TV’s sameness has destroyed many things, such as the American urge toward independent thought.

All of my life I have always had the urge to do things better than anybody else.