Quotes from John McPhee

Some miners' wives take in washing and make more money than their husbands do. In every gold rush from this one to the Klondike, the suppliers and service industries will gather up the dust while ninety-nine per cent of the miners go home with empty pokes.

Only once in the historical record has a jump on the San Andreas exceeded the jump of 1906. In 1857, near Tejon Pass outside Los Angeles, the two sides shifted thirty feet.

The doctor listens in with a stethoscope and hears sounds of a warpath Indian drum.

Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrane.

Remember about mountains: what they are made of is not what made them.

In making war with nature, there was risk of loss in winning.

Behind every tennis player there is another tennis player.

He (Dave Brower) is an emotionalist in an age of dangerous reason.

Another mantra, which I still write in chalk on the blackboard, is "A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression." It's actually a quote from Cary Grant.

I'd much rather watch people do what they do than talk to them across a desk.

It takes as long as it takes.

Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something—anything—as a first draft.

George Sears, called Nessmuk, whose "Woodcraft," published in 1884, was the first American book on forest camping, and is written with so much wisdom, wit, and insight that it makes Henry David Thoreau seem alien, humorless, and French.

Writers come in two principal categories -- those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure.

A lead is good not because it dances, fires cannons, or whistles like a train but because it is absolute to what follows.

Certain English geologists produced confusion by embracing continental drift and then drawing up narratives and maps that showed continents moving all over the earth with respect to a fixed and undriftable England.

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word?

Since most callers have until moments before been completely unaware that there are bears in New Jersey, there is often in their voices a component of alarm, up to and including terror. McConnell's response is calmer than pavement. She speaks in tones that range from ho to hum. "Yes, there are bears in your area," she says, and goes on to say, with an added hint of congratulation, "You live in beautiful bear habitat.

On each of two porches lie big chunks of serpentine—smooth as talc, mottled black and green. When you see rocks like that on a porch, a geologist is inside.

For nonfiction projects, ideas are everywhere. They just go by in a ceaseless stream.

Ideas are where you find them

I wrote a fair amount of poetry in college. It was really, really bad. I mean, bad. And that's how I found out—by doing it.

Young writers find out what kinds of writers they are by experiment. If they choose from the outset to practice exclusively a form of writing because it is praised in the classroom or otherwise carries appealing prestige, they are vastly increasing the risk inherent in taking up writing in the first place.

If you have to ask that question, you wouldn't understand the answer.