Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot.

The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.

In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.

Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither end.

I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others?

Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.

Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.