The climate changed quickly to cold and the trees burst into color, the reds and yellows you can’t believe. It isn’t only color but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly.
Travels with Charley (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 23
I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.
University of California Riverside commencement address, 1975
A simple & small habit that is repeatable & doable. The practice makes the space. You don’t have to feel creative to be creative. Just show up & keep moving.
Typewriter interview, Austin Kleon’s Substack, September 23, 2025.
I have lived for the last eight years in seasonless places, where things do not die, but revolve in a constant tropic sun. I had forgotten how the fall sharpens pencils, gray and colored ones. I had forgotten that when you pay attention to the seasons, you are returned to school and all its feelings, the freedom of three o’clock and the nameless dread of Sunday night, when the sky looms over you like the deadline of some paper you haven’t even started. I want to drink cocoa out of a thermos; I want to go to a high school football game.
Priestdaddy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017), 167–68.
Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good , ed. Adrienne Maree Brown (Chico, CA, 2019), 138.
In my experience of writing, you generally start out with some overall idea that you can see fairly clearly, as if you were standing on a dock and looking at a ship on the ocean. At first you can see the entire ship, but then as you begin work you’re in the boiler room and you can’t see the ship anymore. All you can see are the pipes and the grease and the fittings of the boiler room and, you have to assume, the ship’s exterior. What you really want in an editor is someone who’s still on the dock, who can say, Hi, I’m looking at your ship, and it’s missing a bow, the front mast is crooked, and it looks to me as if your propellers are going to have to be fixed.
Quoted in “Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing No. 1,” Paris Review, Issue 132, fall 1994.
There is no word in the language for end-of-summer sadness, but the human spirit has a word for it and picks up the first sound of its approach.
“Cold Weather,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1944), 349.
My strip is not like the kind that depends on variety or new characters. I’ve got pretty much the same characters and basic idea that I had so many years ago. I want to keep the strip simple. I like it, for example, when Charlie Brown watches the first leaf of fall float down and then walks over and just says, “Did you have a good summer?” That’s the kind of strip that gives me pleasure to do.
Quoted in Barnaby Conrad’s Introduction, in Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2002), 22.
By moonlight all is simple. We are enabled to erect ourselves, our minds, on account of the fewness of objects. We are no longer distracted. It is simple bread and water.
Autumn: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. H. G. O. Blake (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1892), 3–4.
Our metaphors matter. Indeed, our metaphors about trees by and large determine the fate of trees.
Second Nature (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 171.
Try micro-dosing your change. Bring difference and variety into your life. Don’t keep doing what makes you feel dull, rigid, resentful, whatever. Be creative in the small changes—that, in itself, makes you mindful and aware. You’re not just going through the motions; you’re in motion.
“The Challenge of Change,” Jeanette Winterson’s Substack, February 20, 2022.