I Thought It Was Irrelevant To Talk

My First Book Was Published When I Was Thirty-two, So I Think It Was Basically Finished When I Was Thirty Or Thirty-one. And So Then You Think, "well, What Have You Failed To Do?" And My Answer To Myself Was Almost Everything.

I Got Interested In The Question Of Literacy Because Writers Are Always Moaning About Why More People Don't Read Books. They Long For The Good Old Days When People Read Serious Novels.

There Are Instances: [henry David] Thoreau Read [john] Wordsworth, [john] Muir Read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt Read Muir, And You Got National Parks. It Took A Century For This To Happen, For Artistic Values To Percolate Down To Where Honoring The Relation Of People's Imagination To The Land, Or Beauty, Or To Wild Things, Was Issued In Legislation.

Sometimes From This Hillside Just After Sunset The Rim Of The Sky Takes On A Tinge Of The Palest Green, Like The Flesh Of A Cucumber When You Peel It Carefully.

Imagination Runs Through The Places Where We Live Like Water. We Need Both Things-a Living Knowledge Of The Land And A Live Imagination Of It And Our Place In It- If We Are Going To Preserve It.