Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube; there are some things one would rather have done than do.

Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.

I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others?

My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.

In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll begin to see something, maybe. Probably not.

The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning.

The best American writers have come from the hinterlands -- Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.