Some of my ancestors fought in the American Revolution. A few more wore red coats, a few wore blue coats, and the rest wore no coats at all. We never did figure out who won that war.

Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.

Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.

Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.

In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.

We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, and trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails; all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth!