The best American writers have come from the hinterlands -- Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous.

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down.

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

In short I will part with anything for you but you.

I always have my best thoughts on the toilet.

What I try to do is give each actor an environment in which they can do their best work.

I would love to work with the artisans and take it to another dimension, the same way I did in Haiti.

A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held.

An optimist is a man who sees everything half as bad and twice as good as it is.

Once you realize that the way you exist right now is not enough, that there is something more, your spiritual process has already begun.

I try to please myself. I don't try to anticipate what people want to see.

I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.

I feel like there's no such thing as failure.