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

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.

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.

They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.

Yes of course I know it's all a dream. Isn't everything?

No - the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds. And everything's holy - everything, even me.

A lot of people question my image and why I do what I do, and the answer is because this is how I want to present myself.

The biggest change in my life is that I now have to apologize for being thin.

Let all men know how empty and powerless is the power of kings. For there is none worthy of the name but God, whom heaven, earth and sea obey

Heroes are made in the hour of defeat. Success is, therefore, well described as a series of glorious defeats.

We are masters because we have the power to create and to rule our own lives.

Life is a series of problem-solving opportunities. The problems you face will either defeat you or develop you depending on how you respond to them.

Come into my eyes, and look at me through them, for I have chosen a home far beyond what eyes can see.