Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati -- those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.

A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.

Filling out the form: Race? Human. Religion? Paiute. Occupation? Criminal anarchy. Hobbies? Survival with honor.

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

As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.

Fence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side of the fence. There is something to be said for every position.

Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.