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

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.

To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.

Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.

There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.

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