Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.

In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.

But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.

The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from 'bad' to 'very bad.' (Is there another gamut?)

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