Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.

Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.

Only a congenially self-centred person has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

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

I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.

We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.

There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.

Loneliness is a strange gift.

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.

Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.

To achieve style, begin by affecting none.

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

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

The best writing is rewriting.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.