The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.

I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man.

The hawk's cry is as sharp as its beak.

I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.

Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.

We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?

The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.