Animals form an inalienable fragment of nature, and if we hasten the disappearance of even one species, we diminish our world and our place in it.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.

Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today because if you enjoy it today, you can do it again tomorrow.

The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

The world is teeming

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

Anger is poison. You must purge it from your mind or else it will corrupt your better nature.

Some film actors want to sit back and look at every scene and all that crap. No, you're an actor - tell the story, and when it's told, there's another one to tell.

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.

We could all be in a turtle's dream, in outer space!

Order is the law of all intelligible existence.

We must define flattery and praise; they are distinct. Trajan was encouraged to virtue by the panegyric Pliny; Tiberius became obstinate in vice from the flattery of his senators.

American Stance: Everything not forbidden is permitted. Prussian Stance: Everything not permitted is forbidden.

Anger is like gasoline. If you spray it around and somebody lights a match, you've got an inferno. [But] if we can put our anger inside an engine, it can drive us forward.