The fire. The odor of burning juniper is the sweetest fragrance on the face of the earth, in my honest judgment; I doubt if all the smoking censers of Dante's paradise could equal it. One breath of juniper smoke, like the perfume of sagebrush after rain, evokes in magical catalysis, like certain music, the space and light and clarity and piercing strangeness of the American West. Long may it burn.

A woman, as much as a man, is responsible by the age of forty for the character of her face. But women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder to preserve a youthful appearance (the reproductive look) and lose it sooner.

There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.

The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.

If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.

Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?

If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality.