It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.

King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.

Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

It is not an easy thing to inflate a dog.

The dog's life is a good life, for a dog.

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.

When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best.