A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.

It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.

If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality.

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!