The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.
Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.
Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.
We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?
We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.
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.
We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.
How could anything non-controversial be of intellectual interest to grown-ups?
So I write mainly for the fun of it, the hell of it, the duty of it. I enjoy writing and will probably be a scribbler on my dying day, sprawled on some stony trail halfway between two dry waterholes.
The moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses, the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic.
A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.
Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.
The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.
I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.
Epitaphs for a gravestone: 'Please: no hooliganism'; or 'Es prohibe se hace agua aqui'; or 'No comment'.
Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter.
Henry James was our master of periphrasis -- the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.
Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.
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.
Mental degeneracy may be caused by lead poisoning. Or by a poor dip in the gene pool.
Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.
Women: We cannot love them all. But we must try.
I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.
Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my checkbook.
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