Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.

In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.

I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree.

Are people more important than the grizzly bear? Only from the point of view of some people.

Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.

The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.

Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Bablyon and evil as Hell.

Nature, like Maimonides said, is mainly a good place to throw beer cans on Sunday afternoons.

Our “neoconservatives” are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.

Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?

Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.

A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.

Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.

A man's duty? To be ready -- with rifle or rood -- to defend his home when the showdown comes.

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.

The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.

The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while.

The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning.

The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. And we pay them for it.

It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.

Democracy -- rule by the people -- sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America.

The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.

I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.

If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally.

I must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any.

Anywhere, anytime, I'd sacrifice the finest nuance for a laugh, the most elegant trope for a smile.

From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.

The axiom of conditioned repetition, like the binomial theorem, is nothing but a piece of insolence.

I've never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn't have written much better myself.

Among politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for 'To hell with our children.'

Saving the world was merely a hobby. My *vocation* has been that of inspector of desert water holes.

The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.

I have found through trial and error that I work best under duress. In fact I work only under duress.

Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.

I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others?

The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.

When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.

Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it fulfills only a third of the role.

All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love -- and most of all, an audience!

War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.

It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight.

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Epitaphs for a gravestone: 'Please: no hooliganism'; or 'Es prohibe se hace agua aqui'; or 'No comment'.

The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.

I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.

Industrialism, whether of the capitalist or socialist coloration, is the basic tyrant of the modern age.

There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It's not as easy as it looks.

Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily understand: Man is not a lovable animal.

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