The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

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 come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.

Not all questions can be answered.

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.