A man’s duty? To be ready – with rifle or rood – to defend his home when the showdown comes.
Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book’s eventual fate.
Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses...
My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel.
Nothing could be more reckless than to base one’s moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.
Doctrines like Christianity or Islam or Marxism require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions.
Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I’ve always found the second approach the more pleasing.
Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great.
I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.
There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure.
The purpose and function of government is not to preside over change but to prevent change. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient.
Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.
We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.
In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States, industry controls government. That is the principal structural difference between the two great oligarchies of our time.
What good is a Bill of Rights that does not include the right to play, to wander, to explore, the right to stillness and solitude, to discovery and physical freedom?
If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.
All living things on earth are kindred.
Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler’s massacre of the Jews. Genocide’s an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie.
A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear.
The longest journey begins with a single step, not with a turn of the ignition key.