When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.

I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.

Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.

It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to set foot in it. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.

Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.

The feminists have a legitimate grievance. But so does everyone else.