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" Back when I was young, lists seemed like fences on the open range. But secretly, I was pleased to be corralled among other literary thoroughbreds. "

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" Hinde Esther Singer was born in Poland on March 31, 1881, the daughter of Bathsheva and Pinchos Mendel Singer. Bathsheva was an intellectual, but both Bathsheva's father and her husband disapproved of erudite women. "

" One-eyed Reuben 'Rooster' Cogburn is the role that finally delivered John Wayne his Oscar. "

" Back in 1948, a monomaniac called Korczak resolved to impose Crazy Horse's likeness upon a mountain. It took 50 years to complete the head, which measures 90ft from crown to chin. By comparison, the four presidents at Mt Rushmore seem modest. "

" Every year in late June, Custer's Last Stand is reenacted on the high plains of Montana. When Custer led out the 7th Cavalry in 2003 - the year I witnessed it - the audience stood and cheered with turbo-charged patriotism. "

" My own zigzag path through life led me back to Santa Cruz in the early Eighties, and I have revisited regularly since. The place hasn't changed: head in the clouds, backside on the hills and feet in the ocean - one of the most decent and beautiful places on earth. "

" In 1966, I bought my parents a carriage clock for their silver wedding anniversary. It was last wound 30 years later, in December 1996, the month my father died. "

" For me, Jews and football go together like a horse and carriage. "

" At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past. "

" If someone like my father chooses to criticise Israeli policies, it's not because he is a self-hating Jew, but because he is not prepared to live in a state of self-denial. "

" Heinrich Heine once imagined the exiled Israelite as a dog who regains his stolen manhood only when he embraces the Sabbath bride. I see western swing performing a similar function in hardscrabble Texas, turning dirt-poor hired hands into Dapper Dans with magic feet at the Saturday night hoe-down. "

" My history was the Western. I grew up with the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid and Bonanza. I felt as much a child of the West as someone born in Montana or Wyoming. "

" In the 1880s, a weedy Easterner named Owen Wister had something like a nervous breakdown. Wyoming, with its wide-open spaces and healthy pursuits, was prescribed as a cure. Wister was immediately smitten by the taciturn cowboys and the rules imposed upon them by the cattle barons. "

" You have to turn a blind eye to politics in nearly all Westerns. "

" The word 'western' usually refers to movies, of course, but there is a literary tradition of the same name that pre-dates the moving picture and retains its vitality yet. "

" Deadwood lies at the northern tip of the Black Hills, where the land is ancient and rubbed smooth by time. The Black Hills are more rugged at their southern extremity, where bare granite forms pinnacles and spires. "

" McCarthy's prose in 'Blood Meridian' comes blazing from the Book of Revelation. "

" Santa Cruz is blessed not only with natural wonders, but also with gifted souls who can fashion nature's bounty into man-made treasures. "

" I can't go to bed with John Wayne, so I do the next best thing: I go to bed with my girlfriend, who once met the great man. That's how much I love westerns. "

" I owe my discovery of the Hot Club of Cowtown to Kinky Friedman, leader of the Texas Jewboys. When I saw that Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were headlining the 2003 Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival, I thought it my duty to check out the band that had inspired the Texas Jewboys. "

" The summer of 1976 was so hot that bars of chocolate melted on the shelves before confectioners could sell them. "

" I believe that there may well be a personal God out there - not a monotheistic God - that has got it in for me. "

" As I was writing, I realised I wasn't sufficiently extrovert to gather enough interesting souls with tall tales around me. I was no Louis Theroux. But neither was I interested in exploring my inner life in public, in the manner of a Jonathan Raban. "

" Of course the 19th century remained in blissful ignorance of post-modern irony, and the dime novels were made without end. "

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" This was the wonder of advertising; the complete absence of cynicism. It may have many mansions, but it has no room for Doubting Thomases. "

" Everyone in Tel Aviv knows Yosl Bergner. In 2006, the mayor made him a Freeman of the City. Now he carries a card which allows him to park his car anywhere with impunity. If only he could drive. "

" When I was growing up in north-west London, our milkman's cart was pulled by a horse, and cattle still grazed on the meadows near Church Farm. "

" In 1935, Faber & Faber published an anthology entitled 'My Best Western Story' in which the genre's leading practitioners contributed what they considered their finest. Alas, literature the stories ain't; they appear more like fossils from a spent mine. "