The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.

A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.

Music is a savage art, a measured madness.

It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly.

Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.