A journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most nonprivileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army surplus combat boots may enter.

I must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any.

I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars.

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

The hawk's cry is as sharp as its beak.

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.

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