The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.

The nostalgic notion of the family orchards is lovely – all that wholesome fruit for our forebears to sit on the back steps biting into – but basically we were growing it to drink.

Almost any dog thinks almost any human is the Great Spirit, the Primal Creator, and the Universal Force Behind the Sun and Tides. What human can resist?

The trouble with American History is that you don’t remember it, and why should you? Nobody does.

One’s own flowers and some of one’s own vegetables make acceptable, free, self-congratulatory gifts when visiting friends, though giving zucchini – or leaving it on the doorstep, ringing the bell, and running – is a social faux pas.

The United States government, in figuring our gross national product, defines ‘durable goods’ as anything that will last three years.

My friends and I were all deathly afraid of our fathers, which was right and proper and even biblically ordained. Fathers were angry; it was their job.

There is no ‘cat language.’ Painful as it is for us to admit, they don’t need one!

However long you have a cat and however plainly he lays his life open before you, there is always something hidden, some name he goes by in a place you never heard of.

In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.