For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, what you northerners never appreciate...is that Texas is so big that you can live your life within its limits and never give a damn about what anyone in Boston or San Francisco thinks.

Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today because if you enjoy it today, you can do it again tomorrow.

I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting. The waiting. The timeless, repetitive waiting.

Animals form an inalienable fragment of nature, and if we hasten the disappearance of even one species, we diminish our world and our place in it.

A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.

As a writer I have persisted in my uncertainty, alternating between novels which could charitably be considered literature and world reporting which by another stretch of objective standards might be called history.

There are no insoluble problems. Only time-consuming ones.