Little boys love machines; girls adore horses; grown-up men and women like to walk.

A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.

I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact.

My Aunt Ida at age eighty-three: 'Yeah,' she said, 'I'll be dead pretty soon. And frankly, I don't give a damn.'

May your rivers flow without end... down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs... where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you-beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet.

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