The small town smart set is deadly serious about its smartness.

If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there's something wrong with American politics.

America -- rather, the United States -- seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warm-hearted, over-friendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The chuckle among the nations of the world.

If it's freedom you want, come to Texas. No one there tells you what to do and how you have to do it.

In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world.

The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.

here in Texas maybe we've got into the habit of confusing bigness with greatness.