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Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affi...more

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I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented ...more

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All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a ma...more

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On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

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The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

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Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

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For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?

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You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.

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It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. ...more

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Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much sal...more

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At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. ...more

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We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the li...more

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Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? ...more

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Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at ...more

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Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in exper...more