“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”

“A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.”

“I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.”

“I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.”

“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”

“If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.”

“In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.”

“It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.”

“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”

“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.”

“I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.”

“I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”

“Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.”

“Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.”

“One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.”

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”

“So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda.”

“The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.”

“These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.”

“Time is the only critic without ambition.”

“Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.”

“We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.”

“Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.”

“Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.”