Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.

Don't talk to me about other worlds, separate realities, lost continents or invisible realms -- I know where I belong. Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.

The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe -- fear and awe of the State.

A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.

I would like to evoke the sense of wonder and magic in the reader but without invoking the mystical, the supernatural or the transcendent.

All living things on earth are kindred.

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