Edward Abbey
All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love -- and most of all, an audience!Collection: Want
Every man should be his own guru; every woman her own gurette.Collection: Men
Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.Collection: Ridiculous
I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth.Collection: Sloth
I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective.Collection: Writing
I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life -- if I live that long.Collection: Long
I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact.Collection: Simple
Books are like eggs -- best when fresh.Collection: Book
A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Talking
There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline.Collection: Artist
Our contemporary Tories prefer the term 'ordered liberty' to 'freedom'. The word 'freedom' scares them; it has too much of a paleolithic ring to it.Collection: Liberty
Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?Collection: Play
Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.Collection: Life
We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. …Edward Abbey (1927-1989)Collection: Survival
My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.Collection: Dog
It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.Collection: Book
Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.Collection: Dog
Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.Collection: Human Nature
Girls: I never wanted them all. Just all the ones I wanted.Collection: Girl
Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?Collection: Nutcrackers
I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.Collection: Believe
Desert springtime, with flowers popping up all over the place, trees leafing out, streams gushing down from the mountains. Great time of year for hiking, camping, exploring, sleeping under the new moon and the old stars. At dawn and at evening we hear the coyotes howling with excitement—mating season.Collection: Stars
A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.Collection: Miserable
To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?Collection: Dad
I must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any.Collection: Reality
The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.Collection: Gnarly
In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.Collection: Art
Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. And love of power is the root of evil.Collection: Roots
One of the pleasant things about small town life is that everyone, whether rich or poor, liked or disliked, has some kind of a role and place in the community. I never felt that living in a city - as I once did for a couple of years.Collection: Couple
It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world-Nature-is the only means by which we can requite God's obvious love for it.Collection: Mean
I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.Collection: Men
I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.Collection: Real
Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.Collection: Heart
The longest journey begins with a single step, not with the turn of an ignition key. That’s the best thing about walking, the journey itself. It doesn’t much matter whether you get where you’re going or not. You’ll get there anyway. Every good hike brings you eventually back home. Right where you started.Collection: Home
Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.Collection: Unhappy
The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chainsaws. It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.Collection: Soul
Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.Collection: Believe
But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.Collection: Writing
The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. And we pay them for it.Collection: Knowledge
I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.Collection: Book
As Mark Twain said, 'I love Wagner -- if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!'Collection: Cutting
The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.Collection: Work
In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.Collection: Routine
The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while.Collection: Night
The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid.Collection: Cowboy
I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace.... The rest is only hearsay.Collection: Believe
Epitaphs for a gravestone: 'Please: no hooliganism'; or 'Es prohibe se hace agua aqui'; or 'No comment'.Collection: Gravestone
Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter.Collection: Giving