Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.

You long for success? Start at the bottom; dig down.

I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plenitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.

Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.

War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.

I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.