The British were sporting. They would accept a fight under almost all conditions.

There is little in the architecture of a city that is more beautifully designed than a tree.

You never know where life is going to take you. So everything I do, I just take it one day at a time, and it always leads you to the right place.

The hardest part has been maintaining a small head and remaining down to earth. So many people try to make you more than you are.

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

The Bible is the ultimate authority and infallible, not the pastor and not the elders. And it doesn't mean that you believe everything he says without examining it.

I think America is amazing for its landscape and its history. California is beautiful, New York is beautiful, but when you're a gypsy at heart, it probably suits you to be traveling.

Whales are drinking all our water and eating our sailors.

A good wife is like the ivy which beautifies the building to which it clings, twining its tendrils more lovingly as time converts the ancient edifice into a ruin.

Caleb could be so testy for no known reason. At times, it was like dating a woman with irritable bowel syndrome. Or rabies.

The banjo is truly an American instrument, and it captures something about our past.