Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

Our contemporary Tories prefer the term 'ordered liberty' to 'freedom'. The word 'freedom' scares them; it has too much of a paleolithic ring to it.

Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.

A venturesome minority will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their path; let them take risks, for godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches - that is the right and privilege of any free American.

Wilderness begins in the human mind.

My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING - and find it enough.

My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.