Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.

The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.

The elk are the most abundant large herbivores in the Yellowstone ecosystem. There are thousands and thousands of them. They migrate in and out. And those migration routes need to stay open.

Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium.

Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn't rush into it.

By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.

Islands are havens and breeding grounds for the unique and anomalous. They are natural laboratories of extravagant evolutionary experimentation.

I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.

If you are lying in a tent in the Congo jungle, you don't want to be reading about rainforest biology. You want to be in a distant world.

Mathematics to me is like a language I don’t speak though I admire its literature in translation.

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

Every morning you begin a new day, and it is the first day of the rest of your life.

when words make noise, silence can talk.

My main nurturing instinct toward children is mild sadism--picking them up and threatening to drop them--which is why I am a good uncle but would make a poor father.

There's something about the style of living in the country that they feel, "This is what represents me." So style is about the philosophy of how we create our civilization.

When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves.

I think it would be very difficult to play somebody if they didn't think they had any virtues or redeeming characteristics.

I'll see you again in a thousand years.

I joined NOW on an issue of pay.

Patience is eternal genius

I don't have enough faith to be an Atheist.