Men often compete with one another until the day they die. Comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor.

To live is to see, and traveling sometimes speeds up the process.

Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.

A writer's work is to witness things.

It would be hard to define chaos better than as a world where children decide they don't want to live.

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.

Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?