Certainly on the vast windy plain, there was plenty of nothing to be looked at.

Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.

I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice. . . You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day--that way they ain't usually much worse than a dry shave.

Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.

Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps.

Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.

Death and worse happened on the plains.