Despite the recurrence of events in which the debris-basin system fails in its struggle to contain the falling mountains, people who live on the fron… - John McPhee

A quarter-horse jockey learns to think of a twenty-second race as if it were occurring across twenty minutes — in distinct parts, spaced in his consciousness. Each nuance of the ride comes to him as he builds his race. If you can do the opposite with deep time, living in it and thinking in it until the large numbers settle into place, you can sense how swiftly the initial earth packed itself together, how swiftly continents have assembled and come apart, how far and rapidly continents travel, how quickly mountains rise and how quickly they disintegrate and disappear.

No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing.

going to have an industrial society you must have places that will look terrible. Other places you set aside — to say, ‘This is the way it was.’