Chili is one of the great peasant foods. It is one of the few contributions America has made to world cuisine. Eaten with corn bread, sweet onion, sour cream, it contains all five of the elements deemed essential by the sages of the Orient: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, and bitter.

A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.

I love books, food, music, sleep, people who work, heated arguments, the United States of America, and my wife and children. I dislike politicians, preachers, genteel persons, people who do not work or are on vacation, closed minds, movies, loud noises, and oiliness.

As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.

Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled.

Sometimes it's things that take the joy out of life, like a blowout when you're hitting sixty or a button coming off of a shirt when you're in a hurry, but usually it's people.

In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.