This early piece of the morning is mine.

In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.

A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.

We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.