Roger Zelazny Quotes

Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.

Because I'm a walker, natural history is my subject; I've always been obsessed with landscape, and I have an elegiac tone in most of my books.

I make photographs and still make photographs of the natural environment. It's a love because that was part of my life before I was involved in photography.

Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs.

One of the things I enjoy is the challenge of Mother Nature.

I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.

Being in nature is very important to me. I'm not a glamour puss.

I don't spend a lot of time in nature. Probably less than most people that live in urban Texas.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

Children are still in love with the wonders of nature, and I am, too. So I write them stories in hopes that they will want to protect all the beautiful creatures and places.

I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it.

The smartest thing I ever did as a writer was hire a retired conservation agent to blaze a hiking trail for me. It's nothing fancy - just a narrow path that meanders for a little over a mile through the woods near my home. But that trail through the trees has become my therapist, my personal trainer, and my best editor.

Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing.

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.

What I want to do with my filmmaking is help kids experience the truth and wisdom of nature no matter where they are, whether or not they have the opportunity to go to a national park.

A lot of people think the best work I've done was nonfiction - the 'Brothers and Keepers' book. But I think of myself as a fiction writer. And I think, if my work is put in perspective, all the books would be a continual questioning of what's true and what's not true, what's documented and what's not documented.

It would probably surprise people to know that I'm interested in wildlife. I read a lot of poetry, too.

I worry that more and more kids my age are growing up without experiencing the outdoors, which means that fewer will care about the natural world.

I'm always happy when I'm outside working in the company of nature.

I love being out in nature. That is really important. It's everything actually.

In every bio-region, one of the most urgent tasks is to rebuild the community of naturalists - so radically depleted in recent years, as young people have spent less time in nature, and higher education has placed less value on such disciplines as zoology……The times are right for the return of the amateur, twenty-first-century, citizen naturalist. To be a citizen naturalist is to take personal action, to both protect and participate in nature.

The art of seeing nature, or, in other words, the art of using models, is in reality the great object, the point to which all our studies are directed.

For a while I just couldn't imagine that there was a place for me in nonfiction. I looked around at what we were calling nonfiction and I thought, "Maybe you do have to go to poetry in order to do this other weird thing in nonfiction."

I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s.

We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times.