Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.

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.

The national parks belong to everyone. To the people. To all of us. The government keeps saying so and maybe, in this one case at least, the government is telling the truth. Hard to believe, but possible.

A good writer must have more than vin rosé in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink.

Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.