Is it possible to grow wiser without knowing it? One hopes so. We all hope so.

For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.

Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.

I have been a lucky man. But someone has to be.

Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either.

Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words.

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.