There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief – but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave.
What’s more American than violence?” Hayduke wanted to know. “Violence, it’s as American as pizza pie.
I’ve got a crooked elbow and I generally say my prayers with one leg on a brass rail.
But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.
They listened for a while to the perfect music of the wind and rain and night. To the fire and the simmering kettle.
How become a writer? Naturally.
Walking is the only form of transportation in which a man proceeds erect – like a man – on his own legs, under his own power. There is immense satisfaction in that.
Those who have no sense of posterity or any concern for future generations are the ones who are really dead. I mean, they are dead right now. Walking zombies.
It’s a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true – nobody will ever take you seriously.
The more we learn of outer space and inner space, of quasars and quarks, of Big Bangs and Little Blips, the more remote, abstract and intellectually inconsequential it all becomes.
The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an “equalizer.
Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear – the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break.
The shock of the real.
It would be like murder; and where would I set my coffee?
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.
Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.
There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.
Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game.
In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe.