The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.

Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on *taste* usually possess no other talent.

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

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

I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.

Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot.

In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.