Wal-Mart is going in and slaughtering [small towns] just as we once killed the buffalo.

If you lived today as if it were your last, you'd buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn't you?

Adolescence hits boys harder than it does girls. Girls bleed a little and their breasts pop out, big deal, but adolescence lands on a guy with both feet. . . . Your body is engulfed by chemicals of rage and despair, you pound, you shriek, you batter your head against the trees. You come away wounded, feeling that life is unknowable, can never be understood, only endured and sometimes cheated.

When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.

I think that you are only obliged to be a humorist from the age of 18 until you turn 30. Past the age of 30 I don't think there is any obligation to be clever at all.

One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.

America of the future will be all malls connected by interstates. All because your parents no longer can their own tomatoes.