Edward Hoagland

“You should be able to do anything with a novel. It should be a great, big, sloppy, baggy monster.”

“Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.”

“To a naturalist, the woods are a vast library.”

“In order to write about life, you must first live it.”

“The pleasure of reading is that you can choose whose company you keep.”

“The essays that are truly creative are the ones that are not timed.”

“Frogs are smart - they eat what bugs them.”

“We have the sense that we're just a clatter of spare parts, and we were maybe once a machine.”

“I disbelieve in reincarnation, but I believe in the lives of my children.”

“Old age is a cataract, not a disease.”

“The truth is, in order to get things done, you have to be a little bit of a maniac.”

“We are map-makers because we are seekers.”

“A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.”

“City people try to buy time as a rule, when they can, whereas country people are prepared to kill time, although both are fairly idle.”