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

Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.

If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully -- as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.

The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.

I'm in favor of animal liberation. Why? Because I'm an animal.

Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot.