We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us.

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

It's true: Every time you kill an elk, you're saving some cow's life.

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?

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

Night and day the river flows. If time is the mind of space, the River is the soul of the desert. Brave boatmen come, they go, they die, the voyage flows on forever. We are all canyoneers. We are all passengers on this little mossy ship, this delicate dory sailing round the sun that humans call the earth. Joy, shipmates, joy.