War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.

Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.

Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.

I would like to evoke the sense of wonder and magic in the reader but without invoking the mystical, the supernatural or the transcendent.

Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the *locus Dei*.