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.

How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.

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

Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither end.

A journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most nonprivileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter.

It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.

America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.