In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.

Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.

The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.

My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.

I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.

The "terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.

Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.