If we get chased out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, that will be the fifth consecutive Third-world country with no hint of a Navy or an Air Force to have whipped us in the past 40 years.

Nixon was no more a saint than he was a great president.

The most important thing a writer can have [is] the ability to live with the constant loneliness and a strong sense of revulsion for the banalities of everyday socializing.

Sportswriters are a rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks, a gang of vicious monkeys jerking off in a zoo cage... more disgusting by nature than maggots oozing out the carcass of a dead animal.

For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth.

Marathon running, like golf, is a game for players, not winners. That is why Callaway sells golf clubs and Nike sells running shoes. But running is unique in that the world's best racers are on the same course, at the same time, as amateurs, who have as much chance of winning as your average weekend warrior would scoring a touchdown in the NFL.

I wasn't trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn't have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.