Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.
A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.
We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism – a Mongoloid metaphysic.
It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author’s book.
Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.
The best American writers have come from the hinterlands – Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.
The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.
All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love – and most of all, an audience!
When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.
There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline.
When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best.
Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.
How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you’ve lived.
My own best books have not been published. In fact, they’ve not even been written yet.
It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.
The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.
The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante’s paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.
There’s another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary.
We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.
Industrial tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while.