Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.

Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.

The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while.

Nearly all of Latin America, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government.

Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.