I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.

When riding my old Harley a ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in Naples, I kept one consolation firmly in mind: If anything goes wrong, I'll never have time to regret it.

I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

So I write mainly for the fun of it, the hell of it, the duty of it. I enjoy writing and will probably be a scribbler on my dying day, sprawled on some stony trail halfway between two dry waterholes.

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

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.