God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.

A nice thing about war-not that anything about war is nice, I guess-is that while it's going on and you're in it, you never worry about doing the right thing.

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingways dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.

The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.

Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my Utopia.

Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this: WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP. Only he didn't say 'doggone'.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high-school class is running the country.

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.