Do you wish to learn? There are books that can teach you anything, and there is no cheaper form of education, nor one whose effects are more lasting. My education came from books, and they have been my companions by many campfires, in bunkhouses, ships' forecastles, in hotels and on planes. No matter where you find me, I am never far from a book.

To die is nothing. One is here, one is no longer here. It is only at the end one must be able to say 'I was a man'.

Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.

Neither drink [coffee or tea] was known in Frankish lands, but seated in the coffeehouses, I drank of each at various times, twirling my moustache and listening with attention to that headier draught, the wine of the intellect, that sweet and bitter juice distilled from the vine of thought and the tree of man's experience.

Luck comes to a man who puts himself in the way of it. You went where something might be found and you found something, simple as that.

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.

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived.