When guns are outlawed, only the Government will have guns. The Government - and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws.

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.

By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.

May your rivers flow without end... down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs... where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you-beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

Life is already too short to waste on speed.

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

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