it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.

When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past.

You cannot be an egomaniac on the horse. If you lose your temper and start beating him, either you will destroy him, or he will destroy you. As soon as you start riding horses seriously, you're being disciplined on a daily basis about how ignorant you are and what there is left for you to learn.

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?

Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion. ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.