Edward Abbey Quotes
The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.
Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.
In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.
James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end.
I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective.
There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.
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.
My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.
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?)
All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love -- and most of all, an audience!
The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.
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?
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.
Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.
If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully -- as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.
A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.
There are only two kinds of books -- good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.
A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.
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.
Democracy -- rule by the people -- sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America.
Nature, like Maimonides said, is mainly a good place to throw beer cans on Sunday afternoons.
The best argument for Christianity is the Gregorian chant. Listening to that music, one can believe anything -- while the music lasts.
There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.
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.
A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.
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.
We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues; without courage, the other virtues are useless.
Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.
The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.
Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?)
A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.
I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.
There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.
I've never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn't have written much better myself.
