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

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.

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

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

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.

If someone is copying what you do, Congratulate yourself for inspiring that someone to follow your footsteps.

His one essay in love had exhausted his powers in that direction.

The thread of culture that runs through the entire history of punk is also a dedication to challenging the authoritarian.

... the best pilots have need of mariners, besides sails, anchor and other tackle.

Back seat drivers don’t know the feel of the wheel but they sho’ know how to make a fuss" Bob Dylan/Bonnie Raitt, “Let’s Keep It Between Us,” 1982

A sleeping cat is ever alert.

Publication is almost certainly a punishment for having written a book.

I'm less needy about needing to express myself through acting. I have many different lives outside of this that are extremely fulfilling.

I don’t know. Word around the girls’ locker room is that all of you are so hard up, you were cruising the senior center, trying to find a prom date.” – Nick

The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.