The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.

A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.

Life without music would be an intolerable insult.

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism -- a Mongoloid metaphysic.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.