It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.

The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.

In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.

It occurs to me that just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans being in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.

I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

Texas is not a state - it's a state of mind.

War ... a reversal of the rules where a man is permitted to kill all the humans he can.