The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.

God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.

The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an "equalizer."

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.

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere -- particularly if they form loops.

Life: another day, another dolor.