Poetry At Its Best Is The Language

It Is Utterly Soothing To Fly Fish For Trout. All Other Considerations Or Worries Drift Away And You Couldn't Keep Them Close If You Wanted. Perhaps It's Standing Thigh Deep In A River With The Water Passing At The Exact But Varying Speed Of Life. You Easily Recognize This Mortality And It Dissipates Into The Landscape.

This Infantile Sense Of Order Tended To Infect My Life At Large. Up At 5:30 A.m., Coffee, Oatmeal, Perhaps Sausage (homemade), And Fresh Eggs Giving One Of The Yolks To Lola. Listening To Npr And Grieving More Recently Over The Absence Of Bob Edwards Who Was The Sound Of Morning As Surely As Birds. Reading A Paragraph Or Two Of Emerson Or Loren Eiseley To Raise The Level Of My Thinking. Going Out To Feed The Cattle If It Was During Our Six Months Of Bad Weather.

I Asked A French Critic A Couple Of Years Ago Why My Books Did So Well In France. He Said It Was Because In My Novels People Both Act And Think. I Got A Kick Out Of That.

I Couldn't Run A Tight Schedule, And If You're Any Good At Teaching, You Get Sucked Dry Because You Like Your Students And You're Trying To Help Them, But You Don't Have Any Time Left To Write Yourself.

The World That Used To Nurse Us Now Keeps Shouting Inane Instructions. That's Why I Ran To The Woods.