“When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.”

“Life's a dog and then you die? No no. Life is a joyous dance through daffodils beneath cerulean blue skies and then, then what? I forget what happens next."-A Fool's Progress”

“The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dogs barking at me. Not out of any foolish hope that one novelist, or all virtuous novelists in chorus, can make much of a difference for good, except in the long run, but out of the need to prevent the human world from relaxing into something worse. To maintain the tension between truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. ... I believe the highest duty of the serious novelist is, whatever the means or technique, to be a critic of his society, to hold society to its own ideals, or if these ideals are unworthy, to suggest better ideals.”

“When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in. ”

“Walking is the only form of transportation in which a man proceeds erect - like a man - on his own legs, under his own power. There is immense satisfaction in that.”

“This is the most beautiful place on earth.There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome — there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. ”

“The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.”