When at the typewriter I am no longer where I site but am away across the mountains, in ancient cities or on the Great Plains among the buffalo. Often I think of what pitiful fools are those who use mind-altering drugs to seek feelings they do not have, each drug taking a little more from what they have of mind, leaving them a little less. Give the brain encouragement from study, from thinking, from visualizing, and no drugs are needed.

Few of us ever live in the present. We are forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.

My lady had the body of a siren, the face of a goddess, and the mind of an Armenian camel dealer.

Up to a point a person’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and changes in the world about them. Then there comes a time when it lies within their grasp to shape the clay of their life into the sort of thing they wish it to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune or the quirks of fate. Everyone has the power to say, "This I am today. That I shall be tomorrow.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

A man can learn a lot if he listens, and if I didn't learn anything else I was learning how much I didn't know.

when guns are outlawed only the outlaws will have guns.