What's the difference between the Lone Ranger and God? There really is a Lone Ranger.

Grown men do not need leaders.

It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world-Nature-is the only means by which we can requite God's obvious love for it.

Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called 'March of the Soviet Police.'

My Aunt Ida at age eighty-three: 'Yeah,' she said, 'I'll be dead pretty soon. And frankly, I don't give a damn.'

There's nothing so obscene and depressing as an American Christmas.

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