If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally.

We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us.

A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.

In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.

It is not death or dying that is tragic, but rather to have existed without fully participating in life- that is the deepest personal tragedy.

Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly.

The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.