Top 40 John McPhee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Rocks are records of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.”

— John McPhee

2. “It takes as long as it takes.”

— John McPhee

3. “If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.”

— John McPhee

4. “With their four-dimensional minds, and in their interdisciplinary ultra verbal way, geologists can wiggle out of almost anything.”

— John McPhee

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

— John McPhee

6. “If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”

— John McPhee

7. “A piece of writing has to start somewhere, go somewhere, and sit down when it gets there.”

— John McPhee

8. “If you have to ask that question, you wouldn’t understand the answer.”

— John McPhee

9. “The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.”

— John McPhee

10. “The sea is not all that responds to the moon. Twice a day the solid earth bobs up and down, as much as a foot. That kind of force and that kind of distance are more than enough to break hard rock. Wells will flow faster during lunar high tides.”

— John McPhee

11. “Taking things from one source is plagiarism; taking things from several sources is research.”

— John McPhee

12. “We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark, raving mad.”

— John McPhee

13. “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.”

— John McPhee

14. “I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right.”

— John McPhee

15. “If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.”

— John McPhee

16. “He liked to go from A to B without inventing letters between.”

— John McPhee

17. “Writers come in two principal categories – those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure.”

— John McPhee

18. “The group was known as Agassiz’s Club, more officially as the Saturday Club. One summer, when the club went off to the Adirondacks on a camping trip, Longfellow refused to go, because Emerson was taking a gun. “Somebody will be shot,” said Longfellow, explaining that Emerson was too vague to be trusted with a gun.”

— John McPhee

19. “Catch and release fishing may be cruelty masquerading as political correctness.”

— John McPhee

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

— John McPhee

21. “Nonfiction-wha t the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we’re having this morning.”

— John McPhee

22. “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.”

— John McPhee

23. “In the view of conservationists, there is something special about dams, something – as conservation problems go – that is disproportionately and metaphysically sinister. The outermost circle of the Devil’s world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people – and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam.”

— John McPhee

24. “Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders.”

— John McPhee

25. “The enthusiasm geologists show for adding new words to their conversation is, if anything, exceeded by their affection for the old. They are not about to drop ‘granite.’ They say ‘granodiorite’ when they are in church and ‘granite’ the rest of the week.”

— John McPhee

26. “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.”

— John McPhee

27. “I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down the room like paper airplanes.”

— John McPhee

28. “Writing is a suspension of life in order to re-create life.”

— John McPhee

29. “I’m addicted to the entire planet. I don’t want to leave it. I want to get down into it. I want to say hello. On the beach, I could have stopped all day long and looked at those damned shells, looked for all the messages that come not in bottles but in shells...”

— John McPhee

30. “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.”

— John McPhee

31. “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.”

— John McPhee

32. “In six thousand years, you could never grow wings on a reptile. With sixty million, however, you could have feathers, too.”

— John McPhee

33. “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.”

— John McPhee

34. “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.”

— John McPhee

35. “It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.”

— John McPhee

36. “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?”

— John McPhee

37. “I’d much rather watch people do what they do than talk to them across a desk.”

— John McPhee

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

— John McPhee

39. “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 front line are for the most part calm and complacent. It appears that no amount of front-page or prime-time attention will ever prevent such people from masking out the problem.”

— John McPhee

40. “A writer has to have some kind of compulsive drive to do his work. If you don’t have it, you’d better find another kind of work, because it’s the only compulsion that will drive you through the psychological nightmares of writing.”

— John McPhee

41. “Ideas are where you find them.”

— John McPhee

42. “The dictionary definitions of words you are trying to replace are far more likely to help you out than a scattershot wad from a thesaurus.”

— John McPhee

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

— John McPhee

44. “He flings pros into the air like skeet, and one by one he shatters them with cons.”

— John McPhee

45. “The sea is not all that responds to the moon. Twice a day the solid earth bobs up and down, as much as a foot.”

— John McPhee

46. “You find your lead, you build your structure, you are now free to write.”

— John McPhee

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

— John McPhee

48. “They sold box turtles by the gross to people in Philadelphia, who used the turtles to keep cellars free of snails – a market that has declined.”

— John McPhee

49. “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.”

— John McPhee