Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere -- particularly if they form loops.

But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

Wilderness. The word itself is music.

Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world.

The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.

I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.