Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.
Edward AbbeyLet the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs-anything-but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places.
Edward AbbeyIt's all still there in heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure-they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days and years to come.
Edward AbbeyHumankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.
Edward AbbeyThe purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused.
Edward AbbeyI would like to evoke the sense of wonder and magic in the reader but without invoking the mystical, the supernatural or the transcendent.
Edward AbbeyOne must be reasonable in one's demands on life. For myself, all that I ask is: (1) accurate information; (2) coherent knowledge; (3) deep understanding; (4) infinite loving wisdom; (5) no more kidney stones, please.
Edward AbbeyWhy must love always be accompanied--sooner or later--by sorrow and pain? Why not? Because pure bliss is for pure idiots.
Edward AbbeyFence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side of the fence. There is something to be said for every position.
Edward AbbeyNo tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
Edward AbbeyWhy this cult of wilderness?... because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.
Edward AbbeyGenerally speaking, it's a matter of only mild intellectual interest to me whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth. In fact, I don't care a rat's ass either way.
Edward AbbeyJohn Updike: our greatest suburban chic-boutique man of letters. A smug and fatal complacency has stunted his growth beyond hope of surgical repair. Not enough passion in his collected works to generate steam in a beer can. Nevertheless, he is considered by some critics to be America's finest *living* author: Hold a chilled mirror to his lips and you will see, presently, a fine and dewy moisture condensing -- like a faery breath! -- upon the glass.
Edward AbbeyWe need wilderness because we are wild animals. Everyone needs a place where he can go to go crazy in peace. For the terror, freedom, and delirium. Because we need brutality and raw adventure, because men and women first learned to love in, under, and all around trees, because we need for every pair of feet and legs about ten leagues of naked nature, crags to leap from, mountains to measure by, deserts to finally die in when the heart fails.
Edward AbbeyMy notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
Edward AbbeyA leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear.
Edward AbbeyA man's duty? To be ready -- with rifle or rood -- to defend his home when the showdown comes.
Edward AbbeyMy sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel.
Edward AbbeyBelief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses.
Edward AbbeyThe national parks belong to everyone. To the people. To all of us. The government keeps saying so and maybe, in this one case at least, the government is telling the truth. Hard to believe, but possible.
Edward AbbeyTrout fishing. One must be a stickler for proper form. Use nothing but #4 blasting caps, or a hand grenade, if handy, or at a pool well-lined with stone, one blast from a .44 magnum will bring a few stunned brookies quietly to the surface.
Edward AbbeyFrom the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
Edward AbbeyIt is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.
Edward AbbeyWe live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism -- a Mongoloid metaphysic.
Edward AbbeyTerrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.
Edward AbbeyToo 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.
Edward AbbeyThe moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.
Edward Abbey