Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill!
Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.
By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.
In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.
I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.
In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.
The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.
Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds.
A man without a horse is like a man without a weapon: stunted and naked.
This world may be only illusion -- but it's the only illusion we've got.
Writing on the wall: Will trade three blind crabs for two with no teeth.
Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.
Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.
The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.
As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.
So I lived alone. The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally.
Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.
But of the seven deadly sins, wrath is the healthiest - next only to lust.
Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.
Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.
Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.
Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.
The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.
When the situation is desperate, it is too late to be serious. Be playful.
The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone - and to no one.
The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.
The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents.
I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life -- if I live that long.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.
If there's anyone still present whom I've failed to insult . . . I apologize.
Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.
In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.
Is it possible to grow wiser without knowing it? One hopes so. We all hope so.
How could anything non-controversial be of intellectual interest to grown-ups?
Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.
We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.
How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.
My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.
I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact.
Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.
We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around here.
When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best.
I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.
The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.
All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.
There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure.
Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.
I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.
What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.