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Edward Abbey

b: Home, Pennsylvannia., Jan 29, 1927

d: Tuscon, Arizona., Mar 14, 1989

American. Author. Writings champion environmental concerns.

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"Be fair," say the temporizers, "tell both sides of the story." But how can you be fair to both sides of a rape? Of a murder? Of a massacre?

"Have a nice day," said Lady Macbeth.

"Rock" is the music of slaves. Of adolescents pursuing the illusion of freedom and protest while the steel chains of technology bind them ever tighter.

"Rock": music to hammer out fenders by. Music for vomiting to after a hard day spreading asphalt. Vietnam music. Imitation-afro, industrial air-compressor music.

"Say what you like about my bloody murderous government," I says, "but don't insult me poor bleedin' country."

"The mind is everything," wrote Proust. No doubt true, when you're dead from the neck down.

"Welcome to the banquet of life," said a recent Pope, forgetting that most have to fight their way to the table.

A city man is at home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.

A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.

A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.

A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.

A drink a day keeps the shrink away.

A formal education can sometimes be broadening but more often merely flattens.

A genius is always on duty; even his dreams are tax deductible.

A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.

A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.

A good writer must have more than vin rose in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink.

A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. a ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear.

A life without tragedy would not be worth living.

A Mahler symphony is full of surprises – but each surprise, on second hearing, turns out to be an inevitable surprise.

A man is not aware of his virtues (if any). Nevertheless, one hopes that they exist.

A man without a horse is like a man without a weapon: stunted and naked.

A man without passion would be like a body without a soul. Or even more grotesque, like a soul without a body.

A man's duty? To be ready – with rifle or rood – to defend his home when the showdown comes.

A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

A pretty girl can do no wrong.

A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.

A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and The Last Whole Earth Catalog.

A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationalist.

A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business; supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state; supports the National Rifle association, opposes the Pentagon.

A woman, as much as a man, is responsible by the age of forty for the character of her face. But women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder to preserve a youthful appearance (the reproductive look) and lose it sooner.

Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: form of rape by the State.

Ah, to be a buzzard now that spring is here!

Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either.

All dams are ugly, but the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly.

All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.

All gold is fool's gold.

All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence?

All governments require enemy governments.

All is One? But One is so Many!

All power rests on hierarchy: an army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.

All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self-justifying – a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour.

All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love – and most of all, an audience!

America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.

Among politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for "To hell with our children."

An empty man is full of himself.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.

Anarchy works. Italy has proved it for a thousand years.

Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times (ten, actually), trying to get it just right. He failed.

Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.

Anywhere, anytime, I'd sacrifice the finest nuance for a laugh, the most elegant trope for a smile.

Appearance "versus" reality? appearance "is" reality, God damn it!

Apuleius married a rich widow, then wrote The Golden ass.

Are people more important than the grizzly bear? Only from the point of view of some people.

Art, science, philosophy, religion – each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.

As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.

As between the skulking and furtive poacher, who hunts for the sake of meat, and the honest gentleman shooter, who kills for the pleasure of sport, I find the former a higher type of humanity.

As Mark Twain said, "I love Wagner – if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!"

As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.

Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game.

Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.

Be it ever so vile, there's no place like home.

Be of good cheer: We'll live to piss on the graves of our enemies.

Beauty is only skin deep; ugliness goes all the way through.

Belief in God? an afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses ...

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

Beware of the man who has no enemies.

Beware of your wishes: They will probably come true.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word reality in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

Books are like eggs – best when fresh.

By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.

By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. and his fate.

Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.

Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.

Chastity is more a state of mind than of anatomy.

Cheer up, comrades: You can't feel as bad as you look. Or look as bad as you feel.

Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true.

Cities should be like the county fairgrounds: empty places except during times of festival and tournament.

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube: There are some things one would rather have done than do.

Cold morning on aztec Peak Fire Lookout. First, build fire in old stove. Second, start coffee. Then, heat up last night's pork chops and spinach for breakfast. Why not? and why the hell not?

Concrete is heavy; iron is hard – but the grass will prevail.

Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.

Cowboys make better lovers: ask any cow.

Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.

Crossing the bar: "I want to buy a beer for every man in the house. If any."

Daddy, the garbage man is here! Tell him we don't need any.

Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.

Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel.

Democracy – rule by the people – sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in america.

Desire lends strength. aspiration creates inspiration, which, for the artist, is the breath of life.

Desire, said the Buddha, is the cause of suffering. But without desire, what delight?

Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.

England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that's what's wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country.

Epitaphs for a gravestone: "Please: no hooliganism"; or "Es prohibe se hace agua aqui"; or "No comment".

Every analysis leaves a residue of the unknown; this we call God or Karma or – depending on time and place – the UFO. (Unidentified Fucking Object).

Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.

Every man should be his own guru; every woman her own gurette.

Every moment is precious. and precarious.

Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati – those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.

Everyone should learn a manual trade: It's never too late to become an honest person.

Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie.

Farting is such sweet sorrow.

Fence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side of the fence. There is something to be said for every position.

Filling out the form: Race? Human. Religion? Paiute. Occupation? Criminal anarchy. Hobbies? Survival with honor.

Fire lookout, 1400 hours, ferocious lightning storm. Me and God. That fucker is trying to get me again, God damn him. But I got me old .357 ...

Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are – retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.

For women, the sexual act is a means to a higher end. For a man, it is an end in itself.

Freedom begins between the ears.

From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.

Generally speaking, it's a matter of only mild intellectual interest to me whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth. In fact, I don't care a rat's ass either way.

Girls: I never wanted them all. Just all the ones I wanted.

God bless america. Let's save some of it.

Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.

Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.

Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. at present, it fulfills only a third of the role.

Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.

Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.

Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great.

Grown men do not need leaders.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Henry James was our master of periphrasis – the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.

Henry James: our finest lady novelist.

Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers – obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks – chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring ...

Home is where, when you have to go there, you probably shouldn't.

Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.

How can I be so evil? It ain't easy.

How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.

How long does it take to write a good book? all of the years that you've lived.

How to avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup during a chill rain in april out on Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah.

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.

Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.

Humility is a virtue when you have no other.

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.

I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.

I am an enemy of the State. But isn't everyone?

I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the american West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, australia, the human heart, and the male groin.

I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers.

I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace ... The rest is only hearsay.

I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in america or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.

I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.

I find more and more, as I grow older, that I prefer women to men, children to adults, animals to humans ... and rocks to living things? No, I'm not that old yet.

I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words "phenomenology" or "structuralism," I reach for my buck knife.

I have been a lucky man. But someone has to be.

I have found through trial and error that I work best under duress. In fact I work only under duress.

I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.

I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life – if I live that long.

I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. and know and love my own people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. a dangerous man.

I like the smell of oil, grease, gasoline – and gunfire.

I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth.

I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.

I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective.

I wouldn't trade a good horse for the best Rolls-Royce ever made – unless I could trade the Rolls for two good horses.

I'd rather kill a man than a snake. Not because I love snakes or hate men. It is a question, rather, of proportion.

I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.

I'm in favor of animal liberation. Why? Because I'm an animal.

I've never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn't have written much better myself.

I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets – the seventeen who got away.

I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others?

If america could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the american dream.

If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns.

If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture – that is immortality enough for me. and as much as anyone deserves.

If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.

If the end does not justify the means – what can?

If the world is irrational, we can never know it – either it or its irrationality.

If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. and the cha-cha-cha. and Latin rhythms generally.

If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.

If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully – as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.

If you feel that you're not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you complete and adequate assistance when the time comes.

If you're never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You've only missed out on one half of life.

If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts not the institutions of men, then there's hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler's Germany and Rebecca's Sunnybrook Farm.

In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.

In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food.

In america, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.

In art as in a boat, a bullet, or a coconut-cream pie, purpose determines form.

In art as in life, form and subject, body and soul, are one.

In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.

In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. a different race.

In history-as-politics, the "future" is that vacuum in time waiting to be filled with the antics of statesmen.

In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.

In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy.

In my case, saving the world was only a hobby.

In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.

In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military-industrial civilization will soon collapse.

In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.

In the american Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rocks.

In the dog-eat-dog economy, the Doberman is boss.

In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other.

In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood.

In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political – especially that which pretends not to be.

In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States, industry controls government. That is the principal structural difference between the two great oligarchies of our time.

In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe.

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.

Industrialism, whether of the capitalist or socialist coloration, is the basic tyrant of the modern age.

Is a mirage real? Well, it's a real mirage.

Is it possible to grow wiser without knowing it? One hopes so. We all hope so.

Is the archbishop's blessing any more meaningful than the Politician's handshake? The come, they go, with bigger things than us on their minds.

Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?

It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.

It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?

It is not an easy thing to inflate a dog.

It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it.

It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.

It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight.

It is time for us men to acknowledge not only that women are vastly superior beings (that's easy) but also that they are – in every way that matters – our equals. That's hard.

It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.

It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.

It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.

It's true: Every time you kill an elk, you're saving some cow's life.

J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty – you can always tell a shithead by that initial initial.

Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.

James Joyce buried himself in his great work. Finnegan's Wake is his monument and his tombstone. a dead end.

Jane austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.

Jesus don't walk on water no more; his feet leak.

Koan: Why "did" the chicken cross the road?

Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.

Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by any thing else except the resolution of free citizens to defend their liberties.

Life imitates art – but badly.

Life is cruel? Compared to what?

Life is hard? True – but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies.

Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice.

Life is unfair. and it's not fair that life is unfair.

Life without music would be an intolerable insult.

Life: another day, another dolor.

Lifting her skirt, she revealed her treasure. The mother lode. Pretty, I thought, but is it art?

Like any writer, I'd rather be read than dead. Like any serious author, I'd rather be dead than not read at all.

Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. a healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.

Little boys love machines; girls adore horses; grown-up men and women like to walk.

Longevity, like intelligence and good looks and health and strength of character, is largely a matter of genetic heritage. Choose your parents with care.

Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.

Man was created to complete the horse.

Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily understand: Man is not a lovable animal.

Men love their ideas more than their lives. and the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. and to kill for it.

Mental degeneracy may be caused by lead poisoning. Or by a poor dip in the gene pool.

Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things.

Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.

Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.

Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. and love of power is the root of evil.

Mormonism: Nothing so hilarious could possibly be true. Or all bad.

Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything.

Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.

Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.

Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.

Most writers are naturally sycophants. Born in the fetal position, they never learn to stand erect.

Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.

Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.

Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.

Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.

Music is a savage art, a measured madness.

My aunt Ida at age eighty-three: "Yeah," she said, "I'll be dead pretty soon. and frankly, I don't give a damn."

My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.

My books are not taken seriously. But that's all right; they are given playfully.

My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.

My cousin Elroy spent seven years as an IBM taper staring at THINK signs on the walls before he finally got a good idea: He quit.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet.

My Publisher: "Yes, sooner or later, we all wake up dead!"

My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel.

Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful.

Nature, like Miamonides said, is mainly a good place to throw beer cans on Sunday afternoons.

Nearly all of Latin america, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government.

Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never make love to a woman called Mizz *La Belle Dame*.

New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?

No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next – if not a damn sight better.

No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February.

No man-made structure in all of american history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County.

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one.

Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.

Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.

Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.

Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.

Once upon a time, I dreamed of becoming a great man. Later, a good man. Now, finally, I find it difficult enough and honor enough to be – a man.

One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals.

One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.

One must be reasonable in one's demands on life. For myself, all that I ask is: (1) accurate information; (2) coherent knowledge; (3) deep understanding; (4) infinite loving wisdom; (5) no more kidney stones, please.

One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.

One thing worse than self-hatred is chiggers.

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.

Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.

Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter.

Only the half-mad are wholly alive.

Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?)

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.

Our "neoconservatives" are neither new nor conservative, but old as Bablyon and evil as Hell.

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.

Our contemporary Tories prefer the term "ordered liberty" to quot;freedom". The word "freedom" scares them; it has too much of a paleolithic ring to it.

Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris.

Paradise for a happy man lies in his own good nature.

Perfection is a minor virtue.

Phoenix, arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.

Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.

Poetry – even bad poetry – may be our final hope.

Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.

Preacher to me: "a dollar for the Lord, brother?" Me to preacher: "That's all right, I'm headed his way. I'll give it to him when I see him."

Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles ...

Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.

Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.

Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.

Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.

Reason is the newest and rarest thing in human life, the most delicate child of human history.

Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.

Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?

Remembrance of Things Past: an enormous fruitcake laced with cyanide.

Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy.

Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rd-world black, lesbian, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.

Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.

Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature.

Salome had but seven veils; the artist has a thousand.

Saving the world was merely a hobby. My vocation has been that of inspector of desert water holes.

Science is the whore of industry and the handmaiden of war.

Science transcends mere politics. as recent history demonstrates, scientists are as willing to work for a Tojo, a Hitler, or a Stalin as for the free nations of the West.

Scientific method: There's a madness in the method.

Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a thousand books.

Sex is not compulsory, reply the fetus lovers. True: but we're not talking about sex – we're talking about maternity.

Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?

Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top.

Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.

Some of my ancestors fought in the american Revolution. a few more wore red coats, a few wore blue coats, and the rest wore no coats at all. We never did figure out who won that war.

Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.

South of the border: The Hispanics despise the mestizos, the mestizos look with contempt on *Los Indios*, the Indians take it out on their women and dogs.

Spartacus, like Jesus, was also crucified by the Romans. and for equally good reasons.

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.

Suicide: Don't knock it if you ain't tried it.

Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.

Taxation: how the sheep are shorn.

Tee Vee football: one team wins, one team loses – they tie – who cares? and why?

Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.

That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, an indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.

The "terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.

The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.

The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

The author: an imaginary person who writes real books.

The basic question is this: Why should anything exist? Nothing would be tidier.

The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology – the study of life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically.

The best american writers have come from the hinterlands – Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.

The best argument for Christianity is the Gregorian chant. Listening to that music, one can believe anything – while the music lasts.

The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.

The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.

The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.

The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.

The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.

The developers and entrepreneurs must somehow be taught a new vocabulary of values.

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.

The dog's life is a good life, for a dog.

The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.

The ever-rising cost of living: Someday soon, the corporate technicians will be locking meters on our noses and charging us a royalty on the air we breathe.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. a man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

The feminists have a legitimate grievance. But so does everyone else.

The function of an ideal is not to be realized but, like that of the North Star, to serve as a guiding point.

The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.

The greater your dreams, the more terrible your nightmares.

The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. and we pay them for it.

The hawk's cry is as sharp as its beak.

The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.

The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.

The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.

The industrial corporation is the natural enemy of nature.

The Latino military fare badly when they stumble into war with the gringos. But in the torture, murder, and massacre of their own people, they have always performed with brilliance and elan.

The mad scientist was once only a creature of gothic romance; now he is everywhere, busy torturing atoms and animals in his laboratory.

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages – as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.

The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws.

The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents.

The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.a. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.

The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners – and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.

The New age orgy: The flesh was willing but the spirits weak.

The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while.

The nuclear bomb took all the fun out of war.

The one great gift to humankind from our nuclear physicists has been the nuclear bomb. How can we ever thank them?

The one thing worse than a knee-pad Tory is a chickenshit liberal. The type that can not say "shit" even when his mouth is full of it.

The plow has probably done more harm – in the long run – than the sword.

The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.

The purpose and function of government is not to preside over change but to prevent change. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient.

The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.

The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.

The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from "bad" to "very bad." (Is there another gamut?)

The rich are not very nice. That's why they're rich.

The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.

The rifle and handgun are "equalizers" – the weapons of a democracy. Tanks and bombers represent dictatorship.

The sexual revolution transformed the american West: Now even cowboys can get laid.

The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other – instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.

The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe – fear and awe of the State.

The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.

The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill!

The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.

The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning.

The world is wide and beautiful. But almost everywhere, everywhere, the children are dying.

The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.

The writer speaks not to his audience (who wants to listen to lectures?) but for them, expressing their thoughts and emotions through the imaginative power of his art.

There are circumstances in which suicide presents a viable option; a workable alternative; the only sensible solution.

There are only two kinds of books – good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.

There are two kinds are art: (1) decorative, nonobjective, wallpaper art; and (2) art with a moral purpose.

There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.

There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self-effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.

There comes a time in the life of us all when we must lay aside our books or put down our tools and leave our place of work and walk forth on the road to meet the enemy face-to-face. Once and for all and at last.

There has got to be a God; the world could not have become so fucked up by chance alone.

There has never been a day in my life when I was not in love.

There has never been an "original" sin: each is quite banal.

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.

There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure.

There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It's not as easy as it looks.

There is a kind of poetry in simple fact.

There is a wine called Easy Days and Mellow Nights, well-known on the outskirts of the Navajo reservation. It is an economical wine, fortified with the best of intentions, and I recommend it to every serious wino.

There is much to admire in the work of D.H. Lawrence – excepting his queer, soft, gooey, and epicene prose.

There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.

There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline.

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. and then there is California.

There is this to be said for walking: It's the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog.

There never was a good war or a bad revolution.

There's nothing so obscene and depressing as an american Christmas.

There's something about winning at poker that restores my faith in the innate goodness of my fellowman.

This world may be only illusion – but it's the only illusion we've got.

Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on taste usually possess no other talent.

Those who dream of the joys of living in a space colony should live in a space colony.

Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least.

Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither end.

Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.

Three words remain that can yet stir the blood of man: the word "rebellion"; the word "revolt"; the word "revolution".

Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

Tofu and futons. The adepts of Orientalism seem to spend most of their lives reclining. They can't quite summon the energy to crawl up onto a chair. Even their Yogic exercises are carried out in a prone or sitting position.

Too many american authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot.

Truth is always the enemy of power. and power the enemy of truth.

Truth is merely common sense, say the naive realist. Really? Then where, precisely, is the location of – a rainbow? In the air? In the eye? In between? Or somewhere else?

Us nature mystics got to stick together.

War: First day in the U.S. army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.

War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers.

We are all ONE, say the gurus. aye, I might agree – but one WHaT?

We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races – by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character.

We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.

We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism – a Mongoloid metaphysic.

We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues; without courage, the other virtues are useless.

We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around here.

We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us.

Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace – a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for.

What are called inspirational books, like Gibran's The Prophet or Bach's Seagull, seem to have been strained through a bowl of fish-eye tapioca.

What did Jesus say to the headwaiter at the Last Supper? "Separate checks, please."

What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.

What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of any ordinary everyday cloud floating over, say, Tuba City, arizona, on a hot day in June?

What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love.

What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.

What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.

What's the difference between a whore and a congressman? a congressman makes more money.

Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.

When a dog howls at the moon, we call it religion. When he barks at strangers, we call it patriotism.

When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.

When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.

When I hear the word "culture," I reach for my checkbook.

When riding my old Harley at ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in Naples, I kept one consolation firmly in mind: If anything goes wrong, I'll never have time to regret it.

When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.

When the situation is desperate, it is too late to be serious. Be playful.

When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.

When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best.

Whenever I read Time or Newsweek or such magazines, I wash my hands afterward. But how to wash off the small but odious stain such reading leaves on the mind?

Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.

Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.

Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: an administrator is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot.

Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the locus Dei.

Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.

Why I oppose the nuclear-arms race: I prefer the human race.

Why must love always be accompanied – sooner or later – by sorrow and pain? Why not? Because pure bliss is for pure idiots.

Why the critics, like a flock of ducks, always move in perfect unison: Their authority with the public depends upon an appearance of unanimous agreement. One dissenting voice would shatter the whole fragile structure.

Wilderness begins in the human mind.

William Dean Howells: a rubber chicken dangling on a string.

With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams.

Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they'd be intolerable.

Women who love only women may have a good point.

Women: We cannot love them all. But we must try.

Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words.

Writing on the wall: "Will trade three blind crabs for two with no teeth."

You can't belay a man who's falling in love.

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.

You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.

You long for success? Start at the bottom; dig down.

Zen: the sound of the ax chopping. Chopping logic.