All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable.

This was life in the ’30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man’s insecurity before himself and before nature.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

Bears are very nice, as long as you are nice to them.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

Every day, my mom and I would watch a different Judy Garland VHS. I love how she tells a story when she sings. It was just about her voice and the words she was singing – no strings attached or silly hair or costumes, just a woman singing her heart out. I feel like that doesn’t happen that much anymore.

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies – it is the first law of nature.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Image, lyrics, content, storytelling, cohesive body of work – that’s Prince to me.

The ‚peace movement‘ exists only in the fantasies of the paranoid.

Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought… The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

It’s all make believe, isn’t it?

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.

It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

I could hardly sit through ‚Frozen.‘ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

As a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that.

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

To whom it may concern: It is springtime. It is late afternoon.

Nature does nothing in vain.

I grew up in the north woods of Canada. You had to know certain things about survival. Wilderness survival courses weren’t very formalized when I was growing up, but I was taught certain things about what to do if I got lost in the woods.

I’m crepuscular.

Nature is the incarnation of thought. The world is the mind precipitated.

In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.

I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn’t want to give up power.

When Brexiters told the public that people were exaggerating, that there would be a financial meltdown, I think it’s been proven that they were not exaggerating.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.

Nature hates calculators.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

Gardening is not a rational act.

I just try to write songs that people are going to have a dialogue about.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.