Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.

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

What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.

The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents.

Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.

I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets -- the seventeen who got away.

I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.