Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.

Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.

A drink a day keeps the shrink away.

The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while.

Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate; and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze.

Life is already too short to waste on speed.

Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.