“For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.”

“We simply have to learn how to skillfully get out of our own way. Getting out of our own way allows the deep reservoirs of peace and happiness within us to reveal themselves so we may gain more ready access to them.”

“We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.”

“There are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts,we long to know about them.”

“We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of our own people, all of them, to comprehend them (us) and then to make characters and plots in stories that in honesty and with honesty reveal them (ourselves) to us, in whatever situation we live through in our own times: this is the continuing job, and it's no harder now than it ever was, I suppose. Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most”

“We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.”