I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets -- the seventeen who got away.

Beauty is only skin deep; ugliness goes all the way through.

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.

It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.

Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati -- those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.

I would like to evoke the sense of wonder and magic in the reader but without invoking the mystical, the supernatural or the transcendent.

In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.