Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.

As Mark Twain said, 'I love Wagner -- if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!'

The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.

Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace -- a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for.

We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men.

How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.

Say what you like about my bloody murderous government,' I says, 'but don't insult me poor bleedin' country.