In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“What I am really writing about, what I have always written about, is the idea of human freedom, human community, the real… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.” — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies.… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Writing on the wall: Will trade three blind crabs for two with no teeth. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“[I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true. ... It… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati -- those prep school playmates and their Ivy… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you;… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“Our institutions are too big; they represent not the best but the worst characteristics of human beings. By submitting to huge hierarchies of power,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying -- a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“Me, I'm living under a sword too, as Jack may have told you. An old wino's disease, which could lay me in the grave… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
