The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology -- the study of life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically.

New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?

If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.

Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.

Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.

Henry James was our master of periphrasis -- the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.