“Frontiersmen good and bad, gunmen as well as inspired prophets of the future, have been my camp companions. Thus, I know the country of which I am about to write as few men now living have known it.”

The first trip of the Pony Express was made in ten days – an average of two hundred miles a day. But we soon began stretching our riders and making better time.

We got more provisions for our whiskey than the same money, which we paid for the liquor, would have bought; so after all it proved a very profitable investment.

With the help of a friend I got father into a wagon, when the crowd had gone. I held his head in my lap during the ride home. I believed he was mortally wounded. He had been stabbed down through the kidneys, leaving an ugly wound.

I felt only as a man can feel who is roaming over the prairies of the far West, well armed, and mounted on a fleet and gallant steed.

The cholera had broken out at the post, and five or six men were dying daily.

I began to think that my time had come, as the saying is.

It was because of my great interest in the West, and my belief that its development would be assisted by the interest I could awaken in others, that I decided to bring the West to the East through the medium of the Wild West Show.

Springfield has always had a place in my heart.

I had the best buffalo horse that ever made a track.

My first plan of escape having failed, I now determined upon another.

Washington newspaper men know everything.

I thought I was benefiting the Indians as well as the government, by taking them all over the United States, and giving them a correct idea of the customs, life, etc., of the pale faces, so that when they returned to their people they could make known all they had seen.

The Indians were well mounted and felt proud and elated because they had been made United States soldiers.

Wild Bill was a strange character. In person he was about six feet and one inch in height. He was a Plains-man in every sense of the word.

Indians were frequently off their reservations.

I had many enemies among the Sioux; I would be running considerable risk in meeting them.

Everyone has a right to bear arms. If you take guns away from legal gun owners, then the only people who have guns are the bad guys.

No one ever writes a book in which he is the bad guy.

I don’t think human beings are bad. They’re weak. And that’s what makes ’em bad.

Working people have alot of bad habits, but the worst of these is work.

It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer’s life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.

All I want for christmas is your warmth, near the firing woods. Cuddling on the chair, swinging in merry times, forgetting our bad lies.

I had my first kiss when I was 11, but I think I’ve blocked it out of my mind because it was so bad. I’m not even sure it counts as a kiss.

Sin doesn’t make you bad, it makes you dead.