Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.

Girls: I never wanted them all. Just all the ones I wanted.

America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.

To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid.

The axiom of conditioned repetition, like the binomial theorem, is nothing but a piece of insolence.

Home is where, when you have to go there, you probably shouldn't.